Home Health & Hospice Week
CMS Beating The Clock On Payment Shift
When the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced last year that it intended to shift Medicare payments from quantity to quality of care, many people believed the agency would never be able to meet its goal of tying 30 percent of reimbursement to alternative payment models by the end of this year — but CMS has proven the naysayers wrong.
Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that 30 percent of Medicare payments are already linked to alternative payment models that pay for quality of care rather than how many services the doctor performs. Thus, the agency is ahead of its original schedule.
“We reached this goal in partnership with the thousands of providers who collaborated with us in innovation,” said Dr. Patrick Conway, Deputy Administrator for Innovation & Quality and CMS Chief Medical Officer. “It’s in our common interest — as patients, providers, businesses, health plans, taxpayers — to build a health care delivery system that delivers better care; spends health care dollars more wisely; and makes individuals and communities healthier.”
One of the quality-based payment programs next up will be the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) model, which directly affects hospital payments but also will have a heavy impact on HHAs (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXV, No. 8). CJR kicks off April 1. Home Health Value-BasedPurchasing began in nine states on Jan. 1.
Resource: To read more about the shift, visit www.hhs.gov/about/news/2016/03/03/hhsreaches-goal-tying-30-percent-medicare-paymentsquality-ahead-schedule.html#.
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