E-News Updates

The Massachusetts Senate GOP Caucus conducted listening sessions at three Mass Senior Care member nursing facilities. Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr, Senator Vinny deMacedo, Senator Dean Tran, Senator Ryan Fattman and Senator Patrick O’Connor heard directly from front-line operators and staff on the current nursing facility financial, workforce and regulatory challenges facing the sector.

Please join us for Mass Senior Care’s Advocacy Day on Tuesday, May 21, 2019 at 10:00 at the Massachusetts State House in Boston, Grand Staircase (2nd Floor.) We need the full support of the long term care community to rally for critically needed state funding for long term care and to put our dedicated frontline caregivers on a path to a living wage. Please invite your community of staff, residents and family members to attend this important event. In addition,

AHCA has issued the following memorandum in regard to Guidance on Emerging Infection Candida Auris . C. auris is an emerging yeast that can be misidentified as other organisms, is multidrug-resistant, and can spread in health care settings. The April 14th edition of the New York Timesincluded an article here . It is important to know how to identify, treat, and control the spread of this organism. The resources on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website meant for

The Massachusetts Senior Care Foundation's annual scholarship program assists long term care staff in meeting their personal and professional goals through furthering their education. Since 1985, the Foundation has awarded $2.9 million in scholarships to help nearly 1,600 long term care staff to advance their educational and professional development in long term care. The Foundation is now accepting applications for its 2019 scholarship awards. Scholarships from $500 to $2,000 will be awarded to selected applicants to help cover direct, out

The Department of Family and Medical Leave has posted on its website the notice employers and covered business are required to provide to their current workforce notifying them about the state's Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) law. This includes information about contributions, benefits, and protections as outlined in the law (M.G.L. c. 175M sec. 4) on or before May 31, 2019. The notice, which may be provided electronically, must include the opportunity for an employee or self-employed individual to

On April 5, 2019, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) posted on their MDS 3.0 Technical Information web page the final version of the MDS 3.0 Item Sets (Version 1.17.1) which will be effective October 1, 2019. These changes will correspond with and support the implementation of the Patient Driven Payment Model (PDPM) that is replacing the Resource Utilization Groups, version four (RUG-IV) model for determining the skilled nursing facility prospective payment system (SNF PPS) per-diem case-mix payment

The MassMAP Annual Education Sessions will be held at various venues in Massachusetts in May. The focus for these workshops is to bring each region together in their respective areas to improve each facility’s overall capability to prepare for, respond to and recover from a disaster. This year’s education sessions will be full-day and include a table top exercise. Please click here for details and to sign up today. This program is for MassMAP members only and all members must

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) for the Provision of Human Service Transportation (HST) on the Commonwealth’s eProcurement website, COMMBUYS. The purpose of the RFI is to strengthen the current HST Brokerage System’s coordinated approach to providing transportation to multiple health and human service agencies. Please note that as part of the RFI, EOHHS is exploring the possibility of expanding its HST Brokerage System to include non-emergency transportation services

Acts of kindness, compassion and generosity happen every day in the 400 skilled nursing facilities that serve our frail elderly and disabled residents in Massachusetts, but we take time every year to celebrate our residents and staff for one week during National Skilled Nursing Care Week that begins on Mother’s Day, May 12. We celebrate the lives that our residents live, their history and their future. We celebrate the time spent by our staff with our residents, the nurses and

assHealth is conducting a Technical Refresh of the MassHealth Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) to replace its HIPAA compliance and translator tool. This technical refresh will be phased in through March 2020. The tool is used to validate HIPAA compliance and translate the HIPAA compliant transactions to an XML format so that they can be processed within MassHealth’s MMIS. All HIPAA transactions (inbound/outbound) processed through MassHealth’s MMIS will be affected by this technical refresh. All trading partners who submit or

The Massachusetts Culture Change Coalition invites you to participate in a new round of regional forums, designed to bring together long term care providers and other stakeholders interested in pursuing person-centered care. Regional forums serve as venues to share information and ideas about culture change and provide resources to help you get started or expand on your culture change journey. The focus of the Spring 2019 forums is to help providers learn how to offer residents person centered dining and

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released a toolkit highlighting innovative strategies that Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) use to coordinate and manage care for their diverse beneficiary populations to ensure high-quality effective care is provided at the right time and in the right setting. The toolkit includes a section on ‘Coordinating Care for Beneficiaries Who Require Treatment in a SNF.’ Along with the 14-page toolkit, the agency also released seven case studies detailing how individual ACOs

Mass Senior Care invites staff at member facilities to participate in various committees designed to share information on the topics of clinical quality, regulatory, human resources and finance and reimbursement. This information and feedback will assist MSCA staff with developing policy positions and prioritizing strategic initiatives. Committee meetings are held in Mass Senior Care’s office in Waltham. Facility members are invited to participate. If you are interested in attending one of the upcoming committee meetings, please contact Jennifer Chen .