Home Health & Hospice Week

Exemption application for the patient satisfaction  survey requirement due in June. If you've been putting CAHPS on the back burner while tackling OASIS C and other concerns,now's the time to move it up before you get burned. Starting in 2012, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will reduce home health agencies' prospective payment system payments by 2 percent if they don't report patient satisfaction survey data under the new Home Health Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program. Background: HHAs that participate in the CAHPS program must contract with a third party vendor to conduct patient satisfaction surveys that include 34 core required questions and nine optional ones. Agencies may also add their own unique questions to the tool, CMS explained in last year's PPS rate update notice. Agencies must strive to obtain 300 survey completions per year. Although 2012 sounds far away, "you need to start data [...]