Home Health & Hospice Week

Bathing, ambulation, oral meds in the national spotlight.  The Oct. 21 deadline for national rollout of the home health quality initiative may be pushed back, but it's still likely to be only a matter of days until the public is comparing your patient outcomes to your competitors' numbers. Physicians, discharge planners, patients and the public at large will be able to log onto Medi-care's Home Health Compare Web site to look at your patient outcomes soon after the original Oct. 21 launch date, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services spokesperson said in the Oct. 7 Open Door Forum for home health. The delay is due to the difficulty in coordinating both CMS Administrator Tom Scully's and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson's schedules so they can both appear at the kickoff, not to the readiness of the Web site. As part of the project's national launch, CMS will place about 65 paid advertisements in newspapers across the country, the CMS official said. The ads will compare three outcomes among area home health agencies - getting better at moving and walking around, getting better at taking medicines correctly by mouth, and getting better at bathing. Those are the same three outcomes featured in ads for the pilot HHQI project, which ran for eight states beginning in May. On the Home Health Compare Web site, consumers can look at all 11 of an agency's publicly reported patient outcomes once the project starts (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XII, No. 33, p. 258). The ads also will explain briefly what home care is and will refer readers to the Home Health Compare Web site for more information.

Catch Errors in Preview Data Before Consumers Do  Agencies will have a chance to see their data before the public does. CMS already has put the HHQI reports in a folder in HHAs' QIES mailboxes. "The person in your agency who accesses the OBQI report ... and does your OASIS submissions should be the person who gets the preview reports for you," advised CMS' Lori Anderson in the Oct. 3 satellite broadcast on the HHQI project. From the OASIS system welcome page, Anderson instructed, HHAs should: click on "online reports," enter their usual user ID numbers and passwords on the CASPER page, click on the "folders" button at the top of the CASPER welcome page, and click on the folder that begins with an asterisk (*), which will contain the preview data for Home Health Compare. If you find an error in your demographic information - agency name, address, phone number and services provided - you must submit a request in writing to your state OSCAR/ASPEN coordinator to update your records, CMS' Mary Weakland said in [...]