Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: Only half of hospices access free benchmarking reports from CMS.

Stay tuned to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for two new sources of information about your hospice in December.

CMS will issue Hospice Quality Reporting Program reports in December, an agency official said in the Nov. 16 Open Door Forum for home care and hospice providers. And CMS will release Public Use Files on data.medicare.gov next month as well.

Hospices will be able to access their QRP reports in the QIES system in mid to late December, the CMS staffer said.

The PUFs will include national averages for 7 National Quality Forum-endorsed quality measures, the source added.

Other hospice issues raised in the forum include:

• Directory information updates. CMS has updated its Regional Office and state coordinator contact list, which is where you need to report changes to your incorrect or outdated directory information.

Reminder: CMS launched its hospice public reporting initiative by posting a directory that includes all Medicare-certified hospices’ names, addresses, ownership types, CMS Certification Numbers (CCNs), profit statuses, and dates of original CMS certification at https://data.medicare.gov.

You can access the updated RO and coordinator contact list on that site by clicking on the small “Explore All Datasets” box at the bottom of the home page, then choosing “Hospice Data Directory” from the menu on the left, then choosing “Hospice CASPER/ASPEN Contacts” from the menu on the right.

• PEPPER Reports. Hospices are doing better than home health agencies at accessing their PEPPER reports, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. About 56 percent of Medicare hospices have accessed their PEPPER reports versus 24 percent of HHAs (see story, p. 326).

Those stats may reflect the fact that hospices have had more time to get used to the reports. Hospice PEPPER reports, which cover 10 risk areas, launched in 2012. In contrast, HHA PEPPER reports began only last year, said a CMS PEPPER report contractor in the forum.