Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: Sequestration is not going anywhere.

Your CAHPS and HIS reporting stats are about to come under close scrutiny.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is ready to start evaluating hospices’ CAHPS and Hospice Item Set reporting to determine possible reductions to payment rates in 2017, CMS’s Michelle Brazil said in the March 9 Open Door Forum for home care and hospice providers.

Remember: Hospices that don’t fulfill both requirements are subject to a 2 percent reduction, Brazil told forum attendees.

In the 2016 hospice payment final rule, CMS set a 70 percent HIS threshold for 2016, to affect 2018 payments. That goes up to 80 percent in 2017 and 90 percent in 2018.

Providers must review final validation reports following submission of HIS records, Brazil encourages. After submitting required admission and discharge records to the QIES ASAP system, hospices must return to the hospice file submission system to verify the status of the file, she explained.

Do this: “Providers should print and retain their final validation report as evidence of successful submission and processing of HIS records,” Brazil instructed.

If you don’t receive the final validation report or the final validation report has fatal errors listed, “the submission and processing was not successful.

In these instances the provider must correct any errors and resubmit relevant HIS records to the QIES ASAP system,” Brazil said. If a final validation report is not received, that indicates CMS did not receive the HIS record, she added. That will result in noncompliance and a resulting 2 percent reduction.

Other hospice topics addressed in the forum include:

• CAHPS. Public reporting of your hospice CAHPS patient survey data is in the works, CMS’s Debra Dean-Whittaker said in the forum. However, CMS won’t display the data until summer of 2017 at the earliest, Dean-Whittaker projected.

The next CAHPS data submission deadline is May 10, Dean-Whittaker reminded listeners.

• Sequestration. The payment reduction for sequestration continues, CMS’s Wil Gehne confirmed in response to a caller’s question.