Home Health & Hospice Week

Double-check your HIS submissions.

Plan ahead to avoid missing your 30-day Hospice Item Set submission deadline, the feds urge.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently announced that “all Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (QIES) systems will be unavailable from Wednesday, March 16 after 8 pm ET through Monday, March 21, 2016” (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXV, No. 5).

Set your schedule before-hand to ensure you file anything due in that timeframe early, so as not to miss the 30-day HIS deadline, which affects your reimbursement rate, urged CMS’s Mary Best in the agency’s Jan. 27 Open Door Forum for home health and hospice providers.

CMS hasn’t explicitly stated the reason for the longer-than-usual downtime, a CMS official said in response to a provider question. But it has to do with security compliance, she offered.

Wrinkle: One hospice provider asked how to handle an unplanned event such as a patient’s death that would fall in the blackout timeframe.

“We’ll have some we have to report,” she said. Best asked her to submit her question in writing.

Check Your CASPER Folder

You can check on how you’re doing with your HIS submission stats with new reports available via CASPER, noted CMS’s Mary White in the forum. CMS will tell agencies how they’ve stacked up to the 70 percent HIS submission benchmark for HIS assessments completed Oct. 1, 2014 through Sept. 30 2015, and submitted by Oct. 30, 2015, White said in the forum.

CMS aims to encourage hospices to use the reports before their 2016 HIS stats determine their payment update for 2018. CMS will dock agencies 2 percent if they don’t hit the 70 percent mark in 2016, the 80 percent mark in 2017, and the 90 percent mark in 2018.

Going forward, CMS will issue updated reports quarterly, White added.

Pitfall: The reports will help you ensure that the HIS records you think you are submitting to the QIES system are actually received and accepted, a CMS official said.

Verify Your CAHPS Submissions

The next Hospice CAHPS data submission deadline is Feb. 10, CMS’s Debra Dean-Whittaker reminded attendees. Be sure your vendor is submitting your data timely by accessing your data submission reports via the secure portal on the Hospice CAHPS website, Dean-Whittaker urged.

Remember: You must authorize your CAHPS vendor on the CAHPS website, Dean-Whittaker reminded hospices in the forum.