Home Health & Hospice Week

If you assume you can just skip contacting your CAHPS vendor in months where you don’t have any survey-eligible patients, you’ll be jeopardizing your compliance with CAHPS rules. So indicates a recently released question-and-answer set from the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services’ June webinar on achieving a full APU/Market Basket Increase.

Question: “If your agency has no qualifying patients in a month, meaning no surveys are submitted, how does CMS know you were still compliant? There would be a gap, as that month would show no submission,” a home health agency asked in the June 19 webinar.

Answer: “Whenever an HHA does not have any HHCAHPS eligible patients in a month, the HHA contacts its … survey vendor and tells the vendor the HHA has zero patients that month. Then, the survey vendor completes a header record for that month for the HHA,” CMS responds. “The survey vendor is only allowed to complete the form for ‘no patients in a month’ if the HHA has notified the survey vendor. Otherwise, the survey vendor records the month as missed, and the HHA will be assumed to have missed the month rather than reported zero patients for that month.”

Links to the Q&A set and other webinar materials, including to a video recording of the session, is at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HomeHealthQuality Inits/Home-Health-Quality-Reporting-Training.html.