Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: Mind this critical Nov. 16 deadline or pay the price.

Value-Based Purchasing isn’t the only big implementation date coming up in mere weeks. OASIS-E is on track for its Jan. 1 start date as well.

However: At press time, the Office of Management and Budget had not yet approved the final version of the home health patient assessment tool, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official acknowledged in its Nov. 9 Home Health Open Door Forum.

CMS will post the finalized tool once it has received the OMB’s final approval of it, the CMS staffer said in the call.

Reminder: It’s not unusual for OMB to approve OASIS forms at the last minute. CMS often prepares a final-in-all-but-name version of a tool update the summer before the implemen­tation date, then slaps the OMB approval number on it as soon as it comes through. That will likely be the case with the OASIS-E draft that CMS released back in May, experts predict.

Other issues addressed in the forum include:

• Quality reduction reconsideration. When home health agencies fail to submit required quality data, CMS docks their payment rate in the relevant payment year by 2 percent. If

CMS thinks you did so in 2021, you have only a few days left to appeal that decision to avoid a rate cut in 2023.

Reminder: HHH Medicare Administrative Contractors placed letters of noncompliance for Home Health Quality Reporting data in agencies’ iQIES My Reports folders last month (see HHHW, Vol. XXXI, No. 38).

HHAs can submit reconsideration requests until Nov. 16, a CMS official said in the forum. Instructions for submitting the request are at www.cms.gov/medicare/quality-initiatives-patient-assessment-instruments/homehealthquali­tyinits/home-health-quality-reporting-reconsideration-and-exception-and-extension.

• CAHPS vendor training. The next Home Health Care CAHPS Survey Vendor Update Webinar training session will take place on Tues. Jan. 31, 2023, a CMS official noted in the forum. Vendors can register next month.

“Survey vendors who wish to retain their status as approved HHCAHPS Survey vendors must have their HHCAHPS Survey Project Manager attend the session,” CMS notes on its HHCAHPS website.

CMS also will offer a self-paced format for the training in January, it says.