Home Health & Hospice Week

The hard time hospices had getting patients to enroll in the Medicare Care Choices Model is one reason the model didn’t gain much traction with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. So shows a new report from the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.

“A large number of participants exited the model (60 percent) with enrollment concentrated in a small number of hospices,” notes the Innovation Center Report to Congress issued Dec. 12. “This, coupled with the small number of beneficiaries served by the model (representing less than one percent of those who lived near participating hospices and met the claims-based MCCM eligibility criteria), limits the generalizability of the model to the broader CMS beneficiary population,” it notes.

The model did have some pros, including decreasing Medicare spending by 14 percent, “generating $41.5 million in gross Medicare spending reductions and $33.2 million in net savings after accounting for provider payments,” the report notes. Most of those savings came from reducing inpatient care.

On the quality side, “beneficiaries in MCCM were 26 percent less likely to receive an aggressive life-prolonging treatment in the last 30 days of life and spent six more days at home in the period between MCCM enrollment and death,” CMS highlights.

Again, “these findings might not generalize to other settings … given the small number of MCCM hospices and the small percentage of eligible beneficiaries that enrolled,” CMS notes.

The report is at https://innovation.cms.gov/data-and-reports/2022/rtc-2022.