Home Health & Hospice Week

If you’d like to give Medicare officials your opinion on the new hospice Special Focus Program or potential health equity quality measures, you could get your chance on a Technical Expert Panel.

Medicare contractor “Abt Associates is currently recruiting a wide range of hospice, home health, and health equity stakeholders — for example, providers, patient advocates, quality improvement, and health equity experts — to participate in a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) to provide input on a proposed health equity structural composite measure for both hospice and home health care settings,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a new announcement.

And Abt is also soliciting members for the TEP on the forthcoming hospice Special Focus Program, which will target hospices for extra scrutiny. The TEP “provide input on the SFP algorithm that will be used to identify hospices that have substantially failed to meet applicable Medicare requirements based on identified criteria and measures” and “develop public reporting requirements for the SFP (e.g., candidate list, SFP program participants, graduates, termination, etc.) and to recommend methods to communicate this information in a manner that is prominent, easily accessible, readily understandable, and searchable for the general public,” CMS says in a document about the panel.

SFP TEP details are at www.cms.gov/files/document/ tep-nomination-form.pdf-0, including the nomination deadline of Aug. 12. The health equity nomination period also closes Aug. 12 (more information at https://mmshub.cms.gov/get-involved/technical-expert-panel/current).