Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: January Care Compare preview reports have arrived.

Updated guidance on OASIS-E should be coming your way this fall.

So said a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official in the Oct. 11 Home Health Open Door Forum. “CMS will post an updated version of the [OASIS-E] Guidance Manual and [Questions and Answers] later this fall,” the agency’s Jermama Keys told forum attendees. The “update will incorporate guidance from the July 2022 through October quarterly OASIS Q&As,” Keys explained.

“No revisions to the OASIS-E instrument [will be] made at this time,” Keys added.

Watch www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/home-health/home-health-qrp-spotlight-and-announcements for an announcement of the updated manual. In the meantime, a link to the current 397-page manual finalized in December 2022 is at www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/home-health/oasis-user-manuals. Links to the quarterly Q&As are at https://qtso.cms.gov/reference-and-manuals/oasis-quarterly-q.

Other home health issues addressed in the forum include:

• Care Compare. Preview reports and star rating preview reports for the January 2024 refresh of home health data on Care Compare are now in agencies’ iQIES folders, CMS notes on its Home Health Quality Reporting Program announcements webpage. “For this refresh, Home Health (HH) Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) and all HH QRP claims-based measures have been updated and are now based on the standard number of quarters,” the agency reminds.

Meanwhile, new home health data will go up on the Care Compare site this month, Keys confirmed. The preview reports for that data were in HHAs’ iQIES folders from July 17 through Aug. 16.

“The October refresh will add a new claims-based measure for public reporting, the preventable hospitalizations or PPH, and [will] remove an OASIS measure from the public reporting, [Drug Education on] Medications Provided to Patient and Caregiver,” Keys reviewed. CMS began including agencies’ PPH data in their preview reports a year ago, in October 2022. (See more details about the PPH measure in HHHW by AAPC, Vol. XXX, No. 40-41.)

• Equity Reports. Stay tuned for release of new health equity confidential feedback reports, Keys said.

• CAHPS vendor training. CAHPS survey vendors must undergo annual training, CMS’ Beth Simon reminded providers. This year’s session will be on Jan. 24, Simon shared. Stay tuned for registration details.