Home Health & Hospice Week

Watch out: CMS expects use by enforcement agencies.

Industry veterans may be somewhat skeptical of how much newly released ownership data will affect home health and hospice businesses, but it could serve some other purposes.

“Making ownership information transparent benefits researchers and enforcement agencies by allowing them to identify common owners that have had histories of poor performance, analyze data and trends on how market consolidation impacts consumers with increased costs without necessarily improving quality of care, and evaluate the relationships between ownership and changes in health care costs and outcomes,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a release about the new ownership data sets.

The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization praises the release as “a significant step in the right direction for the hospice community to ensure that only well-qualified hospice providers are permitted to care for, and support, benefi­ciaries and their families at the end of life,” it says. It has previously asked the feds for this type of disclosure, NHPCO notes.

The National Association for Home Care & Hospice “appreciate[s] the increased transparency that CMS offers with its home health agency and hospice ownership data,” NAHC President William Dombi says in a release. “It is clear that CMS is well-positioned to evaluate the concerns we previously brought to its attention regarding the surge in hospice growth in several localities that raise program integrity questions.”

More than anything, the data “may be interesting for the industry,” expects attorney Robert Markette Jr. with Hall Render in Indianapolis. “We will have a much clearer picture of ownership, relationships between entities, etc.,” Markette predicts. “That could be informative.”

In particular, “it could be interesting to dive into the data to find out of the 11,000 or so certified HHAs, how many are under common ownership,” Markette suggests. “That would then allow you to determine the actual number of Medicare providers.”

For example: “If a company owns three HHAs, there are three separate PTANs that count towards the 11,000 total,” Markette offers. “But practically, they are just one provider.”