Home Health & Hospice Week

Keep an eye peeled for your five-star preview report. The Centers for Medicare & Medi-caid Services said it would make the reports available at the end of March, but at press time CMS had not yet issued them. CMS did not respond to a re-quest inquiring on the release date for the reports.

CMS will be labeling HHAs with the new star ratings starting in July. HHAs have a number of complaints about the system, including that too many agencies will fall into the middling three-star category (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXIII, No. 7). HHAs also protest that some of the 10 measures used to assign the stars are out of agencies’ control.

Don’t miss: You’ll have only a few weeks to dispute your star rating, CMS noted in a March 26 Open Door Forum about the system. To successfully fight your rating, you must “have evidence that missing or inaccurate data have affected quality measure results” and the “volume of missing or in-accurate data [is] significant enough to potentially affect the final HHC Star Rating,” CMS said.

Deadline: HHAs must submit review re-quests by April 17, according to the forum’s slides. For a list of what you should include in the request, see slide 24 at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HomeHealthQualityInits/Downloads/Thursday-March-26-2015-–-Home-Health-Compare-Star-Ratings-Provider-Preview-Report-webinar-–-slide-deck.pdf.

Be aware that “at CMS discretion, the HHC Star Rating and any affected measures may be suppressed for one quarter while corrections are made,” according to the slides. “Determinations will be made by June 30, 2015.”