Home Health & Hospice Week

Development of the Hospice Outcome and Patient Evaluation tool continues, and it might not be exactly what you expected.

In its 2022 hospice proposed rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services floats the idea of using cross-setting Standardized Patient Assessment Data Elements (SPADES) in the tool. “While the standardization of measures required for adoption under the IMPACT Act of 2014 is not applicable to hospices, it makes reasonable sense to include those standardized elements and items that appropriately and feasibly apply to hospice,” CMS says in the rule. “After all, some patients may move through the healthcare system to hospice, so capturing and tracking key SPADES and social risk factor items that apply to hospice … may help CMS achieve our goals for continuity of care, overall patient care and well-being, interoperability, and health equity.”

The draft HOPE tool “has undergone cognitive and pilot testing, and will undergo field testing to establish reliability, validity and feasibility of the assessment instrument,” CMS says. “We will use field test results to create a final version of the HOPE to propose in future rulemaking for national implementation.”

More HOPE details are at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Hospice-Quality-Reporting/HOPE.