Home Health & Hospice Week

CMS needs to fix Compare problems, despite the format, reps say.

How potential referral sources and patients access your quality data — and compare you to your competitors — will look very different very soon.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services plans to roll up its eight separate Compare websites, including Home Health Compare and Hospice Compare, into one “Medicare Care Compare” tool, CMS Administrator Seema Verma says in a recent blog post.

CMS is planning “a simplified and consistent online experience to make it easier for consumers to find and compare care,” according to the post. Medicare Care Compare will allow “users to access the same information” from the current, separate eight Compare sites “through a single point of entry and simplified navigation.”

The new Compare site will allow users to get “quality data by the type of health care provider,” Verma adds. In addition to the home health and hospice Compare sites, it will also combine those for hospitals, nursing homes, dialysis facilities, long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehab facilities, and physicians.

Timeline: CMS plans a Spring 2020 launch. “In the coming weeks, we’ll be working with various stakeholders, including beneficiaries, patients and their advocates, health care groups, health care providers, researchers and the larger clinical community, to preview new features and gather feedback before the tools are completed and publicly launched,” Verma says. “We’ll continue to make improvements leading up to and following the launch as part of our iterative improvement process and are committed to ensuring beneficiaries and other users have access to the accurate and useful comparison information they rely on,” she adds.

“This appears to be [a] change that will be beneficial to beneficiaries, referral sources and other members of the public,” the National Association for Home Care & Hospice’s Theresa Forster says in the trade group’s newsletter.

“However,” NAHC’s Mary Carr adds, “we won’t know how user-friendly this new system will be until we can see it and use it.”

And the revamp does nothing to fix already existing problems with the Home Health Compare site, points out NAHC President William Dombi. “We remain concerned that the home health star rating methodology involves a distribution of stars, rather than a system that awards stars based on reaching certain performance target levels,” Dombi says in the newsletter. “The CMS model is not consistent with what consumers see in their everyday lives. A change to a consistent model would be the best advance that CMS could make to help beneficiaries navigate the difficult decision of which provider to choose.”

Another new tool: In conjunction with the Compare revamp, CMS plans to launch a new “Provider Data Catalog” that Medicare researchers and stakeholders can use to access more detailed data, Verma says. The catalog will “have an improved interface and intuitive search features to allow users to easily search and download CMS’ publicly reported data, better serving stakeholders who use the interactive and downloadable datasets like those currently found on data.Medicare.gov.”