Home Health & Hospice Week

M0060 key to Web site search.

When potential patients use the new Home Health Compare national Web site to look for a home health agency in their area, they might find you - or an agency in another state.

Inaccurate OASIS reporting is limiting the Web site's effectiveness as a referral tool, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services admitted in its Oct. 3 satellite and Web broadcast regarding the Home Health Quality Initiative.

In the OASIS User's Manual, the response-specific instructions for M0060 (patient zip code) tell HHAs to "enter the zip code for the address of the patient's CURRENT residence" - in other words, the address where the patient is receiving home care services from you now.

Unfortunately, many agencies have not followed those instructions, and the resulting OASIS data inaccuracy is messing up Home Health Compare's search function. That's because the site includes an agency in the results for a zip code's search if the HHA submitted even one OASIS assessment with that zip code in M0060 during the covered 12-month time period.

For example, if an agency in Florida enters a patient's "permanent" address in Michigan in M0060, the Florida agency will show up in that Michigan zip code's search on Home Health Compare. Lots of agencies run into the permanent address problem when patients temporarily relocate only a short distance away from home, often to a relative's house, to receive home care.

Agencies frequently also use a Post Office box zip code in M0060, or the zip code of a corporate office where they bill for the services, a CMS official noted in the Oct. 7 Open Door Forum for home health. "Use the physical address of the house" where you go to provide services, the official urged.

Simple data entry problems are another culprit for agencies showing up in the wrong searches, CMS said in the HHQI broadcast. "It's important to get zip codes correct," CMS' Mary Weakland stressed.

CMS has proposed a way to minimize the inclusion of agencies that don't actually serve a certain zip code, but that show up in Home Health Compare's search for it anyway. It has included a new option to sort the agencies by number of beneficiaries served in the zip code (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XII, No. 33, p. 258).

But currently the user must choose that option instead of the default, which is an alphabetical listing of all agencies with even a single zip code listed for that area.

CMS should consider making the beneficiary-number sorting process the default option, since most consumers probably won't realize they need to weed out out-of-area providers by choosing it, Bob Wardwell with the Visiting Nurse Associations of America suggested in the Open Door Forum.

Another problem with the site's search function is that if a person searches for an HHA in her zip code and no results come up, there is no language prompting the user to widen the search to the whole county, Rachel Hammon with the Texas Association for Home Care commented in the forum. That could make finding HHAs in rural areas difficult, and CMS should consider adding such prompting language, Hammon recommended.

CMS plans to consider the proposals.