Home Health & Hospice Week

If you have questions about the Value-Based Purchasing program, a new question-and-answer document may have the answers.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has released a nine-page Q&A based on the July 27 webinar Overview of the Interim Performance Report (IPR): The July 2023 IPR.

For example, multiple questions address cohorts. Home health agencies go into the smaller-volume cohort when they had fewer than 60 unique beneficiaries in the calendar year prior to the performance year, CMS explains in Question 5. Agencies with 60 or more unique benes in that year go into the larger-volume cohort.

And those assignments will not change within a performance year, because they are based on the previous year, CMS notes in Question 15. For example, an agency’s 2023 cohort is based on its 2022 beneficiary count. “The cohort assignment is updated every July based on the most recent full calendar year,” CMS explains.

The nine-page document including 28 Q&As is at https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/media/document/ hhvbp-exp-ipr-pre-webinar-faqs.