Home Health & Hospice Week

If you want to submit your hospice quality data during Medicare's voluntary reporting period, you now have some guidelines for doing so -- but they are officially draft ones. Although the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services isn't accepting data yet, it has posted the form it is proposing to use for the data submission, as well as a User Guide for the reporting system. The form collects information for the indicator "Participation in a QAPI Program That Includes At Least Three Quality Indicators Related to Patient Care."

CMS will open the data submission period Jan. 1, although the reporting period actually runs from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31. The agency is waiting on Office of Management and Budget approval of the data collection form, which it expects to come  through by January, it says.

You can enter your data in the system before Jan. 1, you just have to use the "save without submitting" option instead of the "save" option, CMS instructs in the 22-page User Guide.

In addition to basic identification information, the data submission form has four questions:  (1) Does your hospice have a QAPI program that includes three or more quality indicators related to patient care?; (2) How many patient care-related indicators are included in your hospice's QAPI program?; (3) List the indicators in your QAPI program (up to 20); and (4) How much time did this take?

In Question 3, CMS instructs hospices to list information such as the number of patients to whom the indicator applies (numerator) and the overall number of patients admitted (denominator).

More information and links to the form and User Guide are at www.cms.gov/LTCH-IRFHospice-Quality-Reporting/10_HospiceQualityReporting.asp.