The hospice documentation readiness checklist.
28 practical checks for election, eligibility, the plan of care, service delivery, coverage, and the final pre-bill review.
Review the record as a connected story.
A complete form is not the same as a supportable claim. The strongest review follows the patient from election through the billed period and tests whether the clinical, operational, and claim records agree.
Use the checklist before billing, for targeted QA, or to standardize review across branches. Apply current CMS, MAC, payer, state, accreditation, and organizational requirements to the individual record.
Choose the cohort.
New admissions, recertifications, long stays, live discharges, or higher levels of care.
Build one timeline.
Read election, certification, assessments, orders, notes, IDG, and claim data together.
Close the loop.
Assign each finding, preserve the correction, and record who cleared the chart for release.
28 checks. One supportable chart.
Check items as you review. Your progress stays in this browser, and the checklist is formatted for printing.
Admission & election
Confirm the benefit started cleanly and the required notices tell one consistent story.
Certification & eligibility
Make the six-month prognosis supportable across the whole benefit period—not only on one form.
Plan of care & IDG
Check that the care being delivered follows a current, individualized interdisciplinary plan.
Visits & service delivery
Make sure the notes prove who did what, why it mattered, and how the patient responded.
Level of care, coverage & billing
Connect clinical need to the level billed, the services covered, and the dates on the claim.
Final consistency pass
Read the chart the way an outside reviewer will: as one chronological evidence trail.
Document the decision—not only the correction.
A completed checklist is a quality-control step, not proof of coverage. Retain the evidence, remediation, reviewer, and release decision under your organization’s policy.
Six patterns worth a second look.
None proves a claim is invalid. Each is a reason to open the complete record before release.
The decline lives only in the certification.
The physician narrative describes a terminal trajectory, but visit notes and assessments do not carry the same patient-specific evidence.
The plan and the visits tell different stories.
Ordered frequency, identified problems, delivered services, and documented interventions do not reconcile.
Stability is copied forward without reasoning.
Repeated “stable” language is not paired with a clinical explanation of why the patient remains eligible or how the plan should change.
A level-of-care change appears first on the claim.
The chart lacks a timely order and daily evidence supporting the need, setting, duration, or return to routine care.
Missing visits have no closed loop.
A missed or declined service is recorded, but the chart does not show communication, clinical impact, follow-up, or plan response.
The timeline breaks under review.
Election, certification, encounter, assessment, order, IDG, discharge, and claim dates conflict or leave unexplained gaps.
A static checklist catches one chart. A workflow changes the pattern.
Brellium helps hospice teams make consistent documentation review part of the pre-bill process, while keeping people in control of the clinical and release decision.
See the hospice workflowConfigure the standard.
Translate organizational, payer, and regulatory requirements into consistent review criteria.
Review every chart.
Use Brellium to apply the configured checks across documentation before billing—not only to a retrospective sample.
Send the evidence to an owner.
Give clinical and operational teams the finding, source evidence, and a clear remediation workflow.
Trend what keeps returning.
See recurring findings by rule, branch, team, or clinician so education and process changes target the real pattern.
Start with the current source.
This checklist is organized around core Medicare hospice documentation controls. Requirements can change and may differ by payer, jurisdiction, setting, and case.
Educational resource only; not legal, clinical, coding, or billing advice. Confirm current requirements with CMS, your Medicare Administrative Contractor and other payers, your organization’s policies, and qualified counsel. A checked item does not establish coverage.
Turn the checklist into a pre-bill control.
See how Brellium helps hospice teams review every chart, route documentation findings, and understand recurring risk before claims go out the door.