Home Health & Hospice Week

Home health and hospice agencies are on their own for benchmarking, at least until next fall.

If you were looking forward to perusing your quality stats in your forthcoming PEPPER report — and taking quality improvement action — you’ll have to change your plans.

Why? “There will be a temporary pause in distributing [Comparative Billing Reports] and PEPPERs as CMS works to improve and update the program and reporting system,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a new notice on its Data Analysis Support and Tracking webpage. “This pause will remain in effect through the fall of 2024.”

PEPPER contractor RELI Group last released hospice benchmarking reports in April 2023 and home health agency reports in July 2023, with updated annual versions on track for this spring and summer, respectively.

CMS’ announcement came “after the [PEPPER] site unexpectedly went down in the final months of 2023,” the National Association for Home Care & Hospice notes in its member newsletter.

PEPPER reports are vital for providers, stresses consulting firm SimiTree. Home health and hospice agencies can identify areas of risk for improper payments using the free reports. PEPPER report data “can be used to identify areas where an agency’s billing, coding, or operational practices may be putting them at risk for an audit or investigation,” the firm stresses on its website.

PEPPER reports can also help providers identify market opportunities and areas for improvement, SimiTree adds.

Yanking the reports without advance warning was surprising. NAHC has reached out to CMS and the PEPPER contractor to request “an alternative path for providers to obtain their PEPPERs” and other information, it says.

So far, CMS offers that “we recognize the importance of these reports to your practice. Therefore, during this time, CMS will be working diligently to enhance the quality and accessibility of the reports.”

Watch for: “In fulfilling this commitment, your feedback is requested. In the near future, CMS will release a Request for Information (RFI) to obtain information from you, the provider community, about how the program can better serve you,” the agency says in the notice.

Note: See the notice at www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/monitoring-programs/data-analysis.