Home Health & Hospice Week

Discharge planning rule puts patients in the driver’s seat, CMS maintains.

Don’t overlook an important duty the discharge planning rule will add to your plate.

“An HHA must develop and implement an effective discharge planning process,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in the rule published in the Sept. 30 Federal Register. “For patients who are transferred to another HHA or who are discharged to a SNF, IRF or LTCH, the HHA must assist patients and their caregivers in selecting a post-acute care provider by using and sharing data that includes, but is not limited to HHA, SNF, IRF, or LTCH data on quality measures and data on resource use measures. The HHA must ensure that the post-acute care data on quality measures and data on resource use measures is relevant and applicable to the patient’s goals of care and treatment preferences.”

Do this: “This will require home health agencies to become familiar with, if not already so, quality measures and data on resource use measures of SNF, IRF and LTCH facilities,” advises the National Association for Home Care & Hospice in its member newsletter. “HHAs will want to ensure education is provided to their staff who will be assisting patients in choosing these types of facilities, and that these staff are able to explain to the patient/caregiver how to interpret the relevant data without swaying the patient/caregiver to choose a particular facility,” the trade group says.

CMS batted down criticism of its Compare websites, noting in the rule that “while the data from these sources are not available in ‘real time,’ the data are posted as soon as feasible.”

The bottom line: “Providers have the ability and knowledge to interpret and discuss the publicly available data on quality and resource use measures at the most basic levels,” the rule maintains. “We do not expect providers to give overly detailed and complex analyses of the quality and resource use data, which may only serve to confuse patients and/or their caregivers, nor do we expect providers to attempt to provide patients and their caregivers with data that do not exist regarding PAC facilities. We expect providers to put forth their best effort to answer patient questions regarding the data.”

The discharge planning final rule “is a huge step to providing patients with the ability to make healthcare decisions that are right for them and gives them transparency into what used to be an opaque and confusing process. By demystifying the discharge planning process, we are improving care coordination and making the system work better for patients,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma says in a release. “Patients will now no longer be an afterthought; they’ll be in the driver’s seat, playing an active role in their care transitions to ensure seamless coordination of care.”