Home Health & Hospice Week

Reach for the stars by pumping up your OASIS training.

Ready or not, your star ratings will be publicly available in less than two months, with a second set of ratings slated for January.

Reminder: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will post star ratings for nine of the 27 currently reported measures on Home Health Compare (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXIV, No. 18). CMS dropped “Pneumococcal Vaccine Ever Received” from its initial proposal.

Home health agencies still have plenty of complaints about the measures CMS retained for its “quality of patient care star ratings” program. For one, “an agency’s ability to stabilize patients is not taken into consideration in the rating system, though it’s often the desired and only outcome for certain patients,” protests benchmarking data vendor Strategic Healthcare Programs.

And HHAs have long bemoaned being held responsible for hospital readmissions, since so many factors influencing the event are out of their control.

Another problem is CMS’s permanent one-quarter delay to publishing data, due to its need to synch its Home Health Compare scores and star ratings, Santa Barbara, Calif.-based SHP notes on its website. “Hospitalization data, the #1 focus for home health and hospitals, will be a whopping nine months old,” the company points out. “On the eve of value-based purchasing, when quality performance has never been more critical, availability of the public data used to evaluate care takes a step backward. This is progress?”

And agencies continue to criticize the clumping of scores in the 3 and 3.5-star categories. “The objective of the star rating is to help consumers choose high quality providers, but CMS has its work cut out for it, as they’ll have to educate consumers on how an ‘average’ score might actually equate to high quality care,” SHP insists. “The system is confusing and misleading. Star ratings are seen everywhere these days, and never does a 3-4 star rating signify ‘the best,’ so how will consumers be expected to use this system in a meaningful way?”

Take action: When trying to prioritize the many needs of your home health agency, you should put OASIS training at the top of the list, experts advise.

Why? Not only does OASIS set your patient’s reimbursement and outcomes, but it now will contribute heavily to your star rating.

“Now, more than ever, the OASIS data must be accurate and reflect a true TOTAL picture of the patient,” urges consulting firm Select Data in analysis of the star rating system. “Make certain agency clinicians understand how to answer the OASIS questions in relation to the patient’s condition and needs as well as the specific OASIS Conventions,” says the Anaheim, Calif.-based firm on its website.