Home Health & Hospice Week

Your data won’t be public, but it will be available to you.

Hopefully your latest Compare stats look good, because you’re going to be living with them for a while.

For HHAs: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services updated the data on Home Health Compare on Oct. 30, confirmed a CMS official in the agency’s Nov. 4 Open Door Forum for home health and hospice providers. And now the site won’t get updated again until January 2022.

In other words, HHAs will see four quarters where “data is held constant” on Home Health Compare in 2021, the CMS staffer explained. “The October 2020 refresh of the Home Health Compare/Care Compare Sites is the last scheduled refresh of this data until the January 2022 refresh,” CMS confirms on its Home Health Quality Reporting Program web page.

For hospices: CMS will update the data on Hospice Compare “later this month,” the CMS source said in the forum. That refresh will reflect data through the fourth quarter of 2019.

And likewise, instead of updating Hospice Compare data throughout 2021, CMS will freeze the data on the site and keep it that way for the entire year, the agency says on its Hospice Quality Reporting Program web page.

Why? Back in March, CMS announced it would not be reporting any quality data from the first two quarters of 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19, the CMS official told forum attendees.

“Due to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, CMS will not publicly report data from Q1 and Q2 2020,” CMS says on the HQRP page. “This means public reporting of hospices’ data in Calendar Year (CY) 2021 will freeze with the November 2020 refresh.”

For measures that compare data in year-long units, data from the first two quarters of 2020 will still be omitted, the CMS staffer explained in response to a question in the forum.

While CMS won’t publicly report your data from the first half of 2020, it will provide the data to you via reports in iQIES, the CMS official revealed. “We will still be issuing those confidential feedback reports,” he said. “You will still have access to those.”

Note: More details about the freeze are in the March 27 memo at www.cms.gov/files/document/guidance-memo-exceptions-and-extensions-quality-reporting-and-value-based-purchasing-programs.pdf, an August HHQRP COVID-19 Public Reporting Tip Sheet at www.cms.gov/files/document/hhqrp-pr-tip-sheet081320final-cx-508.pdf, and the HQRP COVID-19 Public Reporting Tip Sheet at www.cms.gov/files/document/hqrp-pr-tip-sheet081320final-cx-508.pdf.