Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: Compare address update won’t show up right away

If seeing your name splashed across the newspaper with the implication you are doing a bad job seems like a nightmare, you could be in for a rude awakening.

Why? With your quality measures now on display via the new Medicare Hospice Compare website, you could be fair game for local press coverage.

That’s what happened to a Fargo, North Dakota-based hospice, which saw “First report card is ugly for Hospice of the Red River Valley” as the headline describing its Compare scores on the Detroit Lakes news website www.dl-online.com.

The not-for-profit hospice, which also operates in Minnesota, was called on the carpet to explain why it scored a dismal 16.6 percent for patients getting a timely and thorough pain assessment when pain was identified as a problem, as opposed to the national average of 77.7 percent.

HRRV head Tracee Capron told the site that it is the first report card issued for hospices, and her agency did not properly self-report the data. “I am 100 percent certain our staff prioritizes pain management,” she assured. HRRV has corrected the EMR-related data collection error, so that the next Compare refresh will reflect their actual practices — which she went on to explain and defend.

Strategy: If you face similar scrutiny for your scores, you may want to take a page from HRRV’s playbook. Capron pointed out that the hospice’s most recently collected data shows that 92.7 percent of patients got a timely and thorough pain assessment when pain was identified as a problem. She also cited improvement for other measures. But the article favorably compared HRRV’s competitor’s scores to its figures.

“It was devastating for us to see (the Hospice Compare report),” Capron said. “We have an excellent reputation, and we know it doesn’t reflect the care we give.”

Meanwhile, if you failed to catch errors such as a wrong address or phone number in your Hospice Compare preview report, you’re not going to see a quick fix for it. “Updates to Hospice Provider demographic information do not happen in real-time and take approximately 6-months to appear on Hospice Compare,” CMS says on a new post to its website.

Do this: Review both your quarterly Hospice Compare Preview Report in ASPEN and the information displayed on the Hospice Compare website itself for accuracy, CMS urges. If there’s a problem, report the correction to your state’s ASPEN coordinator — not CMS directly.

“Hospice information must be updated and uploaded to the national database by the state’s ASPEN Coordinator, as CMS does not have the access or the authority to change the data in the ASPEN system,” according to the website. You’ve already missed the deadline to update your demographic data for the February refresh. It was Sept. 1.

To secure an update for the May refresh, you must submit your correction to your ASPEN state coordinator by Dec. 1, CMS indicates. More information, including the cut-off date for each quarter and information on locating your ASPEN state coordinator, is at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Hospice-Quality-Reporting/Downloads/Hospice-Compare-Update-8-24-17.pdf.