Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare has collected all the hospice assessment data it’s going to before plunging ahead with final Hospice Outcomes and Patient Evaluation formulation.

After months of urging hospices to participate in HOPE testing, data collection is now complete, said a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official in the agency’s Nov. 9 Open Door Forum for home health and hospice agencies.

CMS and its HOPE contractor are moving on to an analysis phase, the speaker noted. CMS that work will be done in late spring, she added.

CMS thanked the hospices that participated in the data collection.

Other hospice issues addressed in the forum include:

• Care Compare. If the update to hospice data on the Care Compare website last month took you by surprise, there’s a good reason why. The refresh, which added Hospice Quality Reporting Program (HQRP) and Hospice Care Index (HCI) informational videos, was “off cycle,” a CMS staffer noted in the forum.

The site will still get its usual “on-cycle” November refresh, the CMS speaker noted.

However: The November refresh won’t update stats for the claims-based HCI and Hospice Visits in Last Days of Life (HVLDL) measures, the CMS source reminded attendees. Data won’t have changed significantly over a month, she noted.

Instead: CMS will update those claims-based measures next in November 2023, and annually each consecutive November, the official explained.

Meanwhile, hospices can now check out their data for the next refresh in February. “Providers can now access the latest Provider Preview Reports via the … CASPER application,” CMS instructs. “Once released in CASPER, providers will have 30 days during which to review their quality measure results,” CMS reminds providers. However, “the reports will continue to be available for another 30 days, or a total of 60 days,” the agency allows. The preview period for the latest Provider Preview Report lasts from Nov. 9 to Dec. 9.

• Quality reduction. This is your last year to skate by with a 2 percent payment reduction if you failed to meet Hospice Quality Reporting Program requirements in a previous corresponding year, a CMS official reminded hospices in the call.

Now: “Through [fiscal year] 2023, hospices are subject to a 2 percent reduction in their APU for failure to meet the requirements for the [Hospice Item Set] and/or the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) Hospice Survey,” CMS explains on its hospice HQRP reconsideration requests webpage. FY 2023 began last month on Oct. 1.

Then: “Starting with FY 2024, the penalty increases to a 4 percent reduction in APU reduction,” CMS reviews on the page. Data from calendar year 2022, which is going on now, will affect hospices’ FY 2024 rate, which will take effect Oct. 1, 2023.

On the HIS side, hospices must submit at least 90 percent of all required HIS records by a 30-day submission deadline, the CMS speaker noted in the forum. More details are at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Hospice-Quality-Reporting/ Reconsideration-Requests.