Home Health & Hospice Week

PEPs won’t be your only penalty for readmitting patients within a month of discharge.

Medicare’s interest in readmission rates won’t stop with the hospital. Soon the IMPACT measures will rate you on readmitting patients to your own or another HHA.

So revealed Centers for Medicare & Med-icaid Services officials in a Feb. 25 Special Open Door Forum about the IMPACT Act.

“The current home health readmission measure as it stands is a measure that assesses readmissions within the first 30 days of home health following a discharge from an acute care hospital,” explained CMS’s Joel Andress in the forum. That’s the measure CMS will implement first, except with the “potentially avoidable” modifications (see related story, p. 74).

Brand new: But “for home health, we’ll actually be developing a new measure that addresses a new timeframe,” he revealed in the call. “We’ll be moving to cover both. In all the settings eventually, we want to be covering both the 30 days following acute care hospital discharge and the 30 days following discharge from those post-acute care settings.”

In other words, “you’re going to be looking at readmission to the home health agency within 30 days of discharge from the home health agency?” asked a representative from St. Joseph Home Health in California.

“You are correct,” Andress replied. “That measure does not exist yet and we’ll be [developing] this over the course of the next year.”

CMS did not clarify whether HHA readmission will also be calculated with “potentially avoidable” factors.

HHAs may already be sensitive to readmissions because of the partial episode payment (PEP) proration that occurs to their previous episode payment if the patient is readmitted within 60 days of the previous episode’s start date.