Home Health & Hospice Week

Gear up for new quality measures in 2020.

In addition to the payment-related provisions, the 2018 HH PPS final rule contained changes in other areas including:

• Value-Based Purchasing. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized two of its VBP proposals, Under one, CMS will require that HHAs in the program would have to submit a minimum of 40 completed Home Health Care Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey for purposes of receiving a performance score for any of the HHCAHPS measures, up from 20.

The American Hospital Association says it is "pleased" with the change. Under the other proposal, CMS will remove the OASIS-based measure "Drug Education on All Medications Provided to Patient/Caregiver during all Episodes of Care" from VBP. The measure had topped out, CMS indicates in the final rule published in the Nov. 7 Federal Register.

• OASIS. CMS finalized its plan to remove "235 data elements from 33 OASIS items collected at specific time points during a home health episode, effective with all HHA assessments on or after January 1, 2019," according to the rule released Nov. 1.
• HH QRP. CMS finalized a number of Home Health Quality Reporting Program changes ranging from replacing a current pressure ulcer measure with a new one, to adding new measures, to scaling back a proposal for expanded data collection.
• Social risk adjustment. Also under HH QRP, CMS discussed the idea of using social risk factors for risk adjustment.

Note: The final rule is at www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-11-07/pdf/2017-23935.pdf.