Home Health & Hospice Week

A month in, VBP questions abound.

If you’re a home health agency in one of the nine Value-Based Purchasing states, be sure you are signed up for the User IDs and portal accesses you’ll need. If you’re not a provider in a VBP state, you’ll need to cool your heels before you find out much more about the program that’s currently in limited release.

In the Jan. 27 Open Door Forum for home health, parties ranging from software developers to state associations to non-VBP-state HHAs to Quality Improvement Organizations asked the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services if they could attend the series of VBP webinars CMS and its contractors are holding.

The answer to all of them: No. CMS is reserving the webinar spots for the actual HHAs in the nine affected states, said a CMS official in response to a question from Iowa’s state association. By postponing the VBP webinars, CMS was able to triple HHA attendance for the sessions that were rescheduled for Jan. 28, Feb. 4 and Feb. 11, noted CMS’s Marcie O’Reilly in the forum.

High: Back in December, CMS instructed VBP state agencies to establish a primary point of contact (POC) for each unique CCN, O’Reilly noted. As of Jan. 27, 77 percent of Medicare-certified HHAs in the nine states had done so.

Low: But CMS then asked each POC to establish a User ID with the EIDM system, and to report that User ID to the VBP Help Desk to “facilitate registration” for the HH VBP Secure Portal. As of Jan. 27, only 18 percent of the primary POCs had done so, O’Reilly disclosed.

After the primary POC registers for the portal, she will need to request a “Privileged User” role in the Innovation Center portal, O’Reilly noted. Then she will assign roles to other staff (data entry, data review, etc.) in the HH VBP Secure Portal. Those staff must also obtain their own User IDs in the EIDM system and request to be an Innovation Center “Privileged User,” CMS explained in its Dec. 17 educational session on the program.

You won’t need to take those steps until the Secure Portal site is up in March. VBP state agencies that have registered for their primary POC User Ids for the Secure Portal can now just “sit tight” until March, a CMS staffer told one participating agency in the forum’s question-and-answer session.

CMS plans to explain the complexities of the registration process in a webinar in late February, O’Reilly assured listeners. But HHAs and other industry stakeholders not allowed into the webinars are left hanging for now.

Coming up: CMS plans to issue another Frequently Asked Questions set in the future, O’Reilly revealed. The last one issued in late December covered questions received through Dec. 11, she noted (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXV, No. 2).

CMS said in the December FAQs that the Secure Portal site will be up by March, in time for the first quarterly benchmark report.

But agencies won’t start reporting data on the New Measures (Influenza Vaccination Coverage for Home Health Care Personnel; Herpes zoster [Shingles] vaccination; Advanced Care Plan) until October (for the July-October period).

Note: Basic VBP information including a link to the FAQs is at https://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/home-health-value-based-purchasingmodel. The slides from December’s session, which include some registration details, are at https://innovation.cms.gov/Files/slides/hhvbp-odf-homehealthagencies.pdf.