In-home palliative care services available to your patients

If you have ConnectiCare patients who would benefit from in-home palliative care services, you can refer them to Aspire Health, the nation’s largest provider of non-hospice, community-based palliative care.

ConnectiCare covers the full cost of Aspire Health’s services provided to our commercial and most Medicare Advantage members.*

You and other health care providers may refer patients who are ConnectiCare members by calling Aspire Health at 1-844-232-0500. Aspire Health also applies its proprietary algorithm to identify ConnectiCare members who could benefit from palliative care and reaches out to them by mail with information.

Since launching in 2013, Aspire Health has collaborated with doctors to care for more than 50,000 patients with advanced illness. Dr. Tara Friedman is the senior medical director in Connecticut.

Aspire Health teams include clinicians — doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses — plus social workers, chaplains and patient care coordinators. They provide experienced, compassionate “eyes and ears in the home” of patients with serious illness. They are on-call for patients and their families 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Aspire Health clinicians can prescribe medications and provide needed support to manage symptoms, such as pain, difficulty breathing, fatigue, nausea and difficulty sleeping.

Aspire Health will notify your office when a patient has accepted the offer of palliative care. Its robust data collection system allows Aspire Health to track and send you reports on patients’ status and quality metrics. Further, its system produces a summary of every visit and sends it to your office. Aspire Health will follow your preferences and protocols for communicating about patients and coordinating their care.

*Please note, this new program does not cover our members with ConnectiCare Medicare Advantage Passage Dual (HMO SNP) plan.

New medical policies for ocular photoscreening and otoacoustic emissions testing

The medical policies below apply to our commercial plans and go into effect Sept. 1, 2019:

Please refer to the policies for more details.

Medical record reviews for your ConnectiCare commercial patients to start in August

Cognisight, LLC may contact your office from August through December to retrieve and review the medical records of patients who have ConnectiCare commercial plans.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) conducts the annual audit to verify accuracy of diagnosis data that health plans submit to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). We are required to submit supporting medical records on a limited population covered by the audit. Cognisight will call your offices to coordinate a convenient chart retrieval method and set the date when records are needed.

Please respond to Cognisight’s request for records promptly. Notice of the need for these reviews and your required compliance are included in your contract with ConnectiCare.

As our partner and “business associate,” as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), Cognisight is fully HIPAA-compliant and is required to protect, preserve and maintain the confidentiality of any protected health information (PHI) obtained from clinical records provided by medical practices.

We appreciate your help. If you have questions, please call our provider services department at 1-800-828-3407.