Home Health & Hospice Week

Expect CMS to take action on a VBP plan soon, expert predicts. For a clue as to what policy- and lawmakers may include in home health agencies' eventual valuebased purchasing plan, look no further than the pay for performance demonstration that ran in 2007 and 2008. The P4P program: included 567 agencies in seven states; used seven publicly reported outcomes with different weights for reimbursement -- incidence of acute care hospitalization (25 percent), incidence of any emergent care (15 percent), and improvement in bathing (10 percent), ambulation/ locomotion (10 percent), transferring (10 percent), urinary incontinence (10 percent), oral medications management (10 percent), and status of surgical wounds (10 percent); measured outcomes for the time the patient was on service and for 30 days after discharge; used 75 percent of the reward pool for top performers -- the top 20 percent; used 25 percent of the reward pool for top improvers (with a [...]