Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: Medicare offers 2 new Value-Based Purchasing educational tools.

A new month brings a new batch of Value-Based Purchasing learning resources.

In its latest HHVBP Newsletter released May 30, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services includes a new Strategies for Success topic — “strategic practices related to identifying patient strengths and incorporating those strengths into care planning.”

CMS offers a “briefing card that follows an SBAR (situation, background, assessment, and recommendation) format, leading to a recommendation on how an HHA can address opportunities for improvement,” according to the newsletter.

CMS also has made available “a new 20-minute on-demand recording, ‘Patient & Family/Caregiver Engagement: Teaching & Guidance.’” The resource highlights three strategies — “Motivational Interviewing, Self-Management Tools, and Teach-Back — to enhance patient and family/caregiver engagement and potentially improve performance in the expanded Model,” it says.

The recording may help HHAs trying to combat drops in CAHPS scores, experts suggest (see story, p. 155).

And CMS has released a new batch of VBP frequently asked questions, with four new and four updated FAQs.

For example: You may get stuck with incorrect quality data that you submitted, depending on the timing of your correction.

Question Q4012: “Can the Total Performance Score potentially change if a previously submitted OASIS assessment is corrected and resubmitted in iQIES?” one of the new questions reads.

Answer: “A quality episode is the unit of analysis for OASIS-based measures,” CMS explains. “Quality episodes are constructed by matching up assessments for each individual served by a home health agency, sorting those assessments by effective date, then pairing up assessments that mark the beginning and end of a quality episode. Assessments that had been submitted, but were subsequently inactivated and replaced, are not used in the construction of quality episodes or the calculation of any expanded HHVBP Model OASIS-based measure (including the TNC Change measures).” (Emphasis added.)

“Based on the timing of OASIS submissions and data corrections, as well as calculations included in the expanded HHVBP Model reports, the data originally submitted could impact the quality measure scores for the OASIS-based measures and the Total Performance Score (TPS) reported in the expanded HHVBP Model IPRs and APRs,” CMS acknowledges.

But all is not lost if you act quickly. “This would depend on whether the corrected data was received before processing had begun for OASIS data used for a specific IPR or APR. If a correction is received before this processing begins … it will be reflected in the quality measure scores for the OASIS-based measures,” CMS explains.

Note: The new briefing card and a link to the on-demand recording are in the newsletter at https://innovation.cms.gov/media/ document/hhvbp-newsletter-may2023. The FAQs are at https://innovation.cms.gov/media/document/hhvbp-exp-faqs — the new and updated ones are on pp. 6 – 9 of the 66-page document.