Home Health & Hospice Week

The idea of value-based purchasing may not be as trendy in policy circles as it once was, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t find yourself under the Home Health VBP system sooner than you think.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has issued its fourth annual report on the VBP model. The report covers 2019 and involves 1,931 home health agencies, 1.3 million home health episodes, and 801,137 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries, CMS explains.

“Our findings for the second year of the HHVBP payment adjustments (2019) were similar to those for the three earlier years of the model, reflecting an overall reduction in Medicare spending, modest declines in some but not all aspects of utilization, and modest improvements in most quality measures,” CMS says in a summary of its 163-page report.

“Through the first four years of the model, we detected a 1.3 percent decline in average Medicare expenditures per day among FFS beneficiaries in HHVBP relative to the comparison group during and within 30 days following home health episodes,” the report details. That equals a four-year spending reduction of more than $604 million, CMS calculates.

VBP agencies reported frontloading visits, especially those from therapists, and improved functional outcome scores, the report says.

There was also “no evidence of an adverse impact of HHVBP on access to home health care,” CMS maintained in the report linked at https://innovation.cms.gov/innovation-models/home-health-value-based-purchasing-model in the “Evaluations” section.