Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare highlights the practice in latest VBP newsletter.

With the Expanded Home Health Value-Based Purchasing Model’s start date looming ever closer, it may be time to review the lessons learned from the model so far.

For example: “Some HHAs participating in the original Model reported scheduling more skilled nursing visits early in an episode of care (commonly termed ‘frontloading’ visits by home health practitioners) as a quality improvement strategy,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services highlights in its latest HHVBP newsletter. “Frontloading in both post-institu­tional and community-referred episodes was associated with a significant decrease in the probability of an unplanned hospitalization after the second week of the episode,” CMS shares.

More details, including “the effects of frontloading for different patient groups,” are in the Evaluation of the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) Model – Fifth Annual Report released this past April at https://innovation.cms.gov/data-and-reports/2022/hhvbp-fifthann-rpt#page=78.