Home Health & Hospice Week

Start preparing for the next phase of the hospice Medicare Advantage carve-in.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has issued its Calendar Year 2024 Request for Applications for the Value-Based Insurance Design Model’s incorporation of the Medicare hospice benefit. You can take a look at the 68-page RFA to see what CMS expects for next year.

For example: CMS has kept the requirement that “all plans must allow patients to choose to receive care from any hospice in an area rather than limit coverage to only in-network providers,” the National Association for Home Care & Hospice notes.

“The changes in the CY2024 RFA from previous years focus primarily on Advancing Health Equity,” NAHC observes in its member newsletter.

The 2024 RFA is at https://innovation.cms.gov/media/document/cy-2024-rfa-vbid-hospice-benefit-component.

Meanwhile, 2023 program updates are just now taking effect. They include “significant changes related to the network adequacy standard (the minimum number of hospice providers a MA plan with experience in the model must have as part of its contracted network to participate),” NAHC reviews.

This year, 15 Medicare Advantage Organizations will test the inclusion of the Part A hospice benefit in MA through 119 plan benefit packages (PBPs). That’s up from 53 PBPs in 2021 and 115 PBPs in 2022, according to CMS. Those PBPs will run in 806 counties, up from 206 counties in 2021 and 461 counties last year. (See more details and resources in HHHW, Vol. XXXI, No. 36.)