The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services gathers information about staff employed at skilled nursing facilities (SNF) in order to measure the caliber of treatment and care that patients and residents receive and how often the facility experiences staff turnover.
Every member of your staff is required to have a unique employee ID. This ID number is used to reference the employee on your report. No other personally identifiable information such as a name or Social Security number is used to identify employees on a PBJ.
That employee ID has to follow an employee through their entire tenure at your facility in almost all cases, with a few exceptions:
Your PBJ reports also allow you to include your employees’ first and (if applicable) last dates of employment at your facility. Remember, start and end dates are not tracked at the corporate level, so only track when the employee began at your particular facility.
It’s important to note that a contract staff member’s official start date is legally the very first day they performed any paid duties, but their termination date is the day you inform the employee that their contract has ended.
For a staff member, however, both start and end dates of employment are marked when paid work begins and ends.
It is optional, however, to disclude start and end dates from your PBJ reports—though not recommended. Including the information will help more thoroughly correct accidental mistakes in the case of an audit.
One of the most important aspects of PBJ reporting is to track the hours of your entire direct care staff (direct care meaning any employees who use social or interpersonal skills to provide care to patients).
The CMS website doesn’t track time by minutes or hours and instead tracks it by rounding to tenths of an hour, which may seem a little confusing at first, so we’ve included a little conversion chart (borrowed from the CMS website itself) for you below.
So an hour and 15 minutes is written as 1.3.
The date the hours are worked also needs to be recorded. If the employee works a shift that spreads over two days (split between midnight) then it should be recorded as two separate shifts on two days.
The CMJ also organizes employees into different job types, with a unique job code meant to define each. However, it is reasonable to expect that an employee's expected duties may change throughout the course of a shift (for example, if a nurse spends the first half of a shift dispensing medications but the second half of a shift covering for another operator elsewhere in the facility). To account for this, the CMJ allows you to change an employee’s job code every four hours.
Pay codes classify whether the employee works for the facility directly (in exempt or non-exempt status) or is contracted labor. If an employee’s job is governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), they are entitled to overtime pay unless exempt.
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