Home Health & Hospice Week

New site is tailored to mobile devices.

COVID-19 might have delayed the revamp of Medicare’s Compare web tools, but it didn’t scuttle it altogether.

The Medicare Care Compare website, which rolls up its eight separate Compare websites, including Home Health Compare and Hospice Compare, launched Sept. 3. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services first announced the change in January and originally planned to launch it in the spring (see HCW, Vol. XXIX, No. 30), but the pandemic pushed those plans back.

Now, the new site is “a streamlined redesign of eight existing CMS healthcare compare tools available on Medicare.gov,” CMS says in a release. “Care Compare provides a single user-friendly interface that patients and caregivers can use to make informed decisions about healthcare based on cost, quality of care, volume of services, and other data. With just one click, patients can find information that is easy to understand about doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care services instead of searching through multiple tools.”

The change “builds on the eMedicare initiative … first launched by the Trump Administration in 2018 to deliver simple tools and information to current and future Medicare beneficiaries,” CMS points out in the release. The site is “optimized for mobile and tablet use” — for example, “accessing the tool using a smartphone can initiate phone calls to providers simply by clicking on the provider’s phone number,” the agency points out.

The new site simplifies quality checking for beneficiaries. For example, “currently, someone who is planning to have bypass surgery would need to visit Hospital Compare, Nursing Home Compare, and Home Health Compare individually to research providers for the different phases of their surgery and rehabilitation,” CMS offers. “Now, those patients can start their search at Care Compare to find and compare providers that meet their healthcare needs that includes information about quality measures presented similarly and clearly across all provider types and care settings.”

Visit the site at www.medicare.gov/care-compare. For now, “consumers and other stakeholders will be able to use the original eight compare tools while CMS continues to gather feedback and considers additional improvements to the tool,” CMS says.

Providers should try out the site and give feedback to CMS about the process, suggests LeadingAge New York, formerly the New York Association of Homes & Services for the Aging.