Home Health & Hospice Week

Drug regimen review measure will require new OASIS items.

You’ll have a group of new IMPACTAct-required quality measures on your plate soon, if the home health prospective payment system proposed rule for 2017 is finalized.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is proposing four new measures for the Home Health Quality Reporting Program, a CMS official noted in the July 13 Open Door Forum for home care providers. The measures address medication reconciliation, successful discharge to the community, preventable hospital readmissions, and Medicare spending per beneficiary (see more details in story below).

At the same time, CMS wants to cut 34 of the 81 quality measures it currently uses in the Home

Health Quality Initiative and HHQR programs, the CMS staffer noted. In the proposed rule published in the July 5 Federal Register, CMS noted that the 28 HHQI measures and six HHQRP measures have either “topped out” (no longer having sufficient variability to distinguish between providers) or are “of limited clinical and quality improvement value.”

The six HHQRP measures, which are process measures, slated for elimination are:

1. Pain Assessment Conducted;
2. Pain Interventions Implemented during All Episodes of Care;
3. Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment Conducted;
4. Pressure Ulcer Prevention in Plan of Care;
5. Pressure Ulcer Prevention Implemented during All Episodes of Care; and
6. Heart Failure Symptoms Addressed during All Episodes of Care.

Don’t expect to see a corresponding reduction in your OASIS duties, however. “Items used to calculate one or more of these six measures may still appear on the OASIS for previously established purposes that are not related to the HH QRP,” CMS notes in the rule.

Plus: CMS also proposes a new subregulatory process for updating quality measures with “nonsubstantive” changes.

Note: See the proposed rule at https://federalregister.gov/a/2016-15448.