Home Health & Hospice Week

Education on OASIS-D continues.

More than just your data looks new on the Home Health Compare public reporting website.

The refresh last month debuted four new quality measures, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says on its website:

• Assessment-based Percent of Residents or Patients with a Pressure Ulcers that Are New or Worsened (Short Stay) (NQF#0678);
• Assessment-based Drug Regimen Review Conducted with Follow-Up for identified Issues;
• Claims-based Medicare Spending Per Beneficiary-PAC HH QRP; and
• Claims-based Discharge to Community-PAC HH QRP.

What you will not see on the site is the Potentially Preventable 30-Day Post-Discharge Readmissions measure, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official noted in the Feb. 13 Home Health Open Door Forum. CMS plans “more testing to determine if there are modifications that may be needed both to the measure and to the method for displaying the measure,” CMS says on its Home Health Quality Reporting Program website. “The additional testing will ensure that the future publicly reported measure is thoroughly evaluated so that Compare users can depend upon an accurate picture of provider quality.”

Other home health topics addressed in the forum include:

• OASIS-D Errata. Medicare has its OASIS-D Guidance Manual up to date with a recently released errata document, a CMS staffer said in the forum. “This Errata document includes corrections to the final version of the OASIS-D Guidance Manual,” CMS notes on its website.

The four-page errata file is at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HomeHealthQualityInits/Downloads/OASIS-D-Guidance-Manual-Errata-08-06-2018.pdf.

• HHQRP education. Registration is still open for CMS’s in-person HHQRP train-the-trainer event March 5 and 6 in Baltimore, a CMS source told attendees. The session will focus on OASIS-D, among other Quality Reporting Program topics.

Register via a link at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HomeHealthQualityInits/Home-Health-Quality-Reporting-Training.html.