Home Health & Hospice Week

In order to get new home health quality data up by January on Medicare’s Care Compare website — the successor to the old Home Health Compare page — the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services needed to get reporting changes approved by this October, CMS reports in the rule published in the Aug. 4 Federal Register. Since the home health final rule often isn’t published until early November, the hospice regulation was the viable option.

The plan: CMS will issue HHAs’ preview reports by October, and the new data will go up on the site in January, the rule explains. To achieve that goal, “we are proposing to resume public reporting using 3 out of 4 quarters of data for the January 2022 refresh” for OASIS-based measures, CMS details. The reporting will skip over Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 of 2020, when the COVID-19 public health emergency began.

For other measures using eight or 12 quarters of data, CMS will reach further back in time to get the full amount of data or omit some quarters, again skipping over Q1 and Q2 2020. CMS specifies exactly which measures will use which quarters of data in Table 20 of the rule, but they all exclude 2020 Q1 and Q2.

CMS will use this “COVID-19 PHE Affected Reporting (CAR) scenario … for refreshes for January 2022 for OASIS and for refreshes from January 2022 through July 2024 for some claims-based measures,” the rule explains.

“Our proposal to adopt the CAR scenario for the January 2022 refresh would allow us to begin displaying recent data in January 2022, rather than continue displaying October 2020 data,” CMS says. “Updating the data in January 2022 by more than a year relative to the October 2020 freeze data can assist the public by providing more relevant quality data and allow CMS to display more recent HHA performance,” CMS concludes.

“Similarly, using fewer than standard numbers of quarters for claims-based measures that typically use eight or twelve months of data for reporting between January 2022 and July 2024 will allow us to begin providing more relevant data sooner,” CMS adds. “Our testing results indicate we can achieve these positive impacts while maintaining high standards for reportability and reliability.”

One commenter did suggest “including a statement that data cover care provided during the COVID-19 PHE for eight quarters,” CMS notes in the rule. But CMS dismisses the idea. “Such an announcement will not help consumers distinguish between HHAs in their region,” the agency protests. “Instead, we will continue to post state and national averages for HH QRP measures. This information will help consumers understand relative performance at national and local levels in light of the COVID-19 PHE.”