Home Health & Hospice Week

Some patients should be excluded from this new quality reporting measure, providers tell CMS.You should already be collecting data on your patients' pain management, but many hospices are hoping Medicare throws out some of that data in calculating outcomes.So said a multitude of hospices in their comments on the 2013 home health prospective payment system final rule, which included a section on hospice quality reporting (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XXI, No. 25).Currently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services plans to include data from patients who, under National Quality Forum-endorsed measure #209 on pain management, report pain upon admission and then are unable to respond to the measure 48 hours later due to death, disease progression, etc."Only patients who can self-report at both the initial assessment and the 48-hour mark should be included," urges Hospice of Dubuque in its comment letter on the rule published in the July 13 Federal [...]