Home Health & Hospice Week

Get your past OASIS submission stats in an forthcoming report.

Will your OASIS submission stats starting next month be good enough to keep you from getting hit with a pay cut? An upcoming report will give you a clue.

Reminder: In the 2015 home health pro-spective payment system final rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized a requirement for home health agencies to hit a 70 percent benchmark for OASIS submission (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXIII, No. 39). HHAs must successfully submit an OASIS record for 70 percent of those episodes qualifying as a “quality episode of care,” according to the rule published in the Nov. 6, 2014, Federal Register.

The metric applies only to “OASIS assessments that contribute, or could contribute, to creating a quality episode of care,” CMS notes on its HHQR web page.

The first reporting year that will affect HHAs’ payments will start July 1, CMS noted in a June 2 Open Door Forum on the topic. If you fail to hit the 70 percent OASIS submission benchmark, you’ll see a 2 percent reduction to your Medicare reimbursement rates in 2017.

To help you prepare, CMS will distribute a 2013-2014 Quality Assessments Only (QAO) His-torical Performance Report via the CASPER system, CMS said in the forum. The report header will contain “the name and CMS Certification Number (CCN) of the HHA, a description of the date range for the assessments, the QAO score for 2013-2014 , and a note indicating whether this level of performance would meet the 2015-2016 performance criterion,” the agency described in its forum slides.

In the rule, CMS held off on finalizing an 80 percent and 90 percent benchmark for the following two years. Watch for an update in the 2016 HH PPS rule for that information, CMS said. v

Note: More details on the computations and report are online at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HomeHealthQualityInits/Home-Health-Quality-Reporting-Requirements.html.