Home Health & Hospice Week

If you want to respond to Medicare’s call for comment on including hospice in the Medicare Advantage program, you may want to get an idea of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ thinking on the matter first.

In its 2020 proposed rule, CMS asked interested parties to submit comments on the idea (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXVIII, No. 16). And CMS held an April webinar on how the carve-in might work in the Value-Based Insurance Design model.

Priorities: CMS would like hospice inclusion in MA to achieve a number of goals, including “pull[ing] upstream a broader range of palliative and supportive care services” and “reduc[ing] issues seen in both ‘tails’ (i.e. short and long lengths of stay issues),” according to the slides for the webinar. The model should support concurrent care, CMS said.

Allowing Medicare Advantage plans to offer Medicare’s hospice benefit “is designed to increase access to hospice services and facilitate better coordi­nation between patients’ hospice providers and their other clinicians,” CMS says on its VBID website.

The slides are at https://innovation.cms.gov/resources/vbid-hospice-intervention.html. CMS plans a second webinar that will address multiple topics, including how MA plans and hospices might collaborate, it says.