Home Health & Hospice Week

Process measures, M0 item changes will mean big changes for HHAs.

Providers are one step closer to seeing the majorly revamped assessment tool they’ll start using in 2010, and it may include a lot more work for assessing clinicians.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has issued its latest version of the OASIS-C tool, and it contains the changes CMS and OASIS contractor officials described in a recent industry conference (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XVII, No. 37, p. 290).

The addition of process measures focused on vaccinations and risk assessments, long-anticipated modifications to items like ambulation, and elimination of the prior status column for ADLs are just some of the many changes CMS and its contractors have incorporated into the new form. Providers should take a hard look at the latest form and provide feedback on it, CMS’s Deborah Terkay urged attendees at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice’s annual meeting last month. The deadline for comments is Jan. 13, 2009, according to a notice in the Nov. 14 Federal Register.

More change ahead: CMS plans to take providers’ comments seriously and revamp the tool one more time before issuing the final data collection instrument next year, Terkay noted. CMS already has made significant revisions to the tool based on provider comment, both from public notices and from field testing that took place this year, so HHAs’ feedback is important, she stressed.

Resource: You can see the new OASIS-C form and its supporting documents at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/PaperworkReductionActof1995/PRAL/list.asp -- search for CMS-R-245. Or email editor Rebecca Johnson at rebeccaj@eliresearch.com with "OASIS-C November" in the subject line for a free pdf copy.