Elara Caring sits in an unusual spot this year. As one of the few national providers running both home health and hospice at scale, the organization is absorbing two different reimbursement stories at once, and they're pulling in opposite directions.

On the home health side, CMS finalized a net payment reduction of 1.3% for calendar year 2026, a real improvement from the 6.4% cut originally proposed, but still a cut. Every dollar of margin now has to come from somewhere else: fewer denials, faster turnaround, or lower operating cost per chart (source).

On the hospice side, the picture looks better on paper. CMS finalized a 2.6% payment update for fiscal year 2026, an estimated $750 million increase nationally. But that update comes with a catch: hospices that don't meet Hospice Quality Reporting Program requirements face a 4% payment penalty, which nets out to a 1.4% reduction once you offset the increase (source). In other words, the hospice increase is conditional on documentation and reporting holding up. For an organization managing quality reporting across a large hospice footprint, that's not a small detail.

Put those two together, and Elara Caring is managing margin pressure on the home health side and reporting risk on the hospice side, in the same fiscal year, across the same coding and QA infrastructure.

Where accuracy does the most work

Coding accuracy sits at the center of both problems, just in different ways.

On home health, accuracy protects the margin that's already been cut. Every denial or take-back tied to a coding error is money that was already thin to begin with. A 4x faster turnaround doesn't just help cash flow, it means claims go out clean the first time instead of getting reworked.

On hospice, accuracy protects the quality reporting numbers that determine whether the 2.6% increase actually lands or gets clawed back through the HQRP penalty. That's a direct line from documentation quality to payment, not an indirect one.

This is part of why running one coding partner across both service lines, instead of two separate vendors, matters more this year than it might have in the past. A single accuracy standard applied consistently across home health and hospice means the same certified experts protecting margin on one side are protecting reporting compliance on the other, with one team accountable for both instead of two vendors each optimizing for their own slice of the business.

What this looks like day to day

For an organization the size of Elara Caring, spanning 200-plus locations, this isn't a theoretical exercise. It shows up in how consistently OASIS items get coded across regions, how quickly claims move from chart to submission, and whether quality reporting data holds up under CMS scrutiny without last-minute scrambling.

Olli Health's certified coding and QA experts touch every chart, with no exceptions, across both home health and hospice, at 98% accuracy and 4x faster turnaround than legacy vendors, at roughly half the cost. For an organization managing both reimbursement pressures at once, that's not a convenience. It's the difference between reacting to each year's payment rule and having margin and compliance protected regardless of which direction the rule moves.

The best way to see what that looks like on real charts is a 30-day pilot, no long-term commitment required. It's a chance to see the accuracy, speed, and support firsthand before making any decision.