CMS is extending its nationwide freeze on new Medicare enrollments for hospice and home health agencies for an additional six months as part of its efforts to combat fraud, waste and abuse.
The agency announced the initial six-month moratorium May 13 and said in a Nov. 12 news release that the conditions prompting the restrictions have not sufficiently improved to lift them.
The extension will continue to prohibit new Medicare enrollment applications and certain changes in majority ownership for hospice and home health providers nationwide.
However, CMS is modifying the restrictions to allow currently enrolled hospices and home health agencies to add new practice locations under their existing Medicare enrollments. The original moratorium prohibited these additions.
The extension will not affect existing Medicare enrollments or prevent currently enrolled providers from continuing to deliver services.
“We’ve made real progress over the past six months, but fraud in hospice and home health persists and our work isn’t finished,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD, said in the news release.
The agency said the enrollment freeze allows it to conduct targeted investigations and use advanced data analytics to identify potentially fraudulent providers.
In October, CMS conducted a two-day enforcement operation targeting hospice and home health providers in California. The operation resulted in 145 provider revocations associated with more than $703 million in Medicare and Medicaid payments, according to the agency.
The extension follows changes finalized Nov. 4 under the calendar year 2027 Home Health Prospective Payment System final rule.
Those changes, which apply across Medicare provider and supplier types, allow CMS to make Medicare enrollment revocations retroactive to the date a provider became noncompliant, enabling the agency to recover payments made during periods of noncompliance.
The rule also expands grounds for denying or revoking Medicare enrollment, including when an enrollment poses a high risk of fraud, waste and abuse because of an excessive concentration of providers and suppliers in a limited geographic area.
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