Home Health & Hospice Week

Your HIS, CAHPS data will soon be on display.

The date may be unclear, but you can bet referral sources, potential patients and competitors will be scanning your star rating soon.

In its 2016 proposed payment rule for hospices, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services confirms that it plans to publicly report hospice quality data derived from the new HIS and CAHPS requirements. CMS just doesn’t know quite when it will start.

“We recognize that public reporting of quality data is a vital component of a robust quality reporting program and are fully committed to developing the necessary systems for public reporting of hospice quality data,” CMS says in the rule. “We also recognize that it is essential that the data made available to the public be meaningful and that comparing performance between hospices requires that measures be constructed from data collected in a standardized and uniform manner.”

CMS is taking its time to verify the early data hospices are submitting. “We believe it is critical to establish the reliability and validity of the quality measures prior to public reporting in order to demonstrate the ability of the quality measures to distinguish the quality of services provided,” the agency explains. “To establish reliability and validity of the quality measures, at least four quarters of data will be analyzed.”

Date: “Decisions about whether to report some or all of the quality measures publicly will be based on the findings of analysis of the CY 2015 data,” CMS says.

“A timeline for posting hospice data on a public data set has not been determined,” CMS stresses. CMS may post such a timeline before the final rule comes out, though, the agency says.

When CMS does decide to start reporting the data, “we will develop a CMS Compare Web site for hospice,” the rule says. “Like other CMS Com-pare Web sites, the Hospice Compare Web site will feature a quality rating system that gives each hospice a rating of between one (1) and five (5) stars.”