Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: Medicare urges you to use strategic practices for maintenance patients.

As home health agencies get further into their first performance year under Expanded Home Health Value-Based Purchasing, Medicare continues to tweak its VBP tools.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has updated two documents related to calculating VBP quality measures, the agency says: “Calculating Episode- Level Observed Values for the Total Normalized Composite Change Measures” and “Risk Adjustment in the Expanded HHVBP Model.”

The three-page TNC document reviews calculation details for the TNC Change in Mobility measure and the TNC Change in Self-Care measure.

Remember: “The TNC measures are unique to the expanded HHVBP Model and not used in the HH Quality Reporting Program (QRP),” CMS explains in the tool.

The six-page risk adjustment document goes over risk adjustment for the VBP model. It reviews binary measure outcomes versus continuous measure outcomes and the risk adjustment differences for each type.

“These updates consider the changes, starting in calendar year (CY) 2023, to Home Health Quality Reporting Program (HH QRP) measure maintenance, including the 1/1/2023 transition to OASIS-E,” points out the National Association for Home Care & Hospice.

Maintaining Function, Slowing Decline Is OK

And if you serve maintenance patients, CMS has VBP resources for you.

“This month’s Strategies for Success highlights strategic practices related to patients who may be viewed as maintenance patients eligible for home care that require skilled care to maintain function or prevent or slow decline in function,” CMS says in its most recent HHVBP newsletter.

CMS offers a “briefing card, which follows an SBAR (situation, background, assessment, and recommendation) format, leading to a recommendation on how an HHA can address opportunities for improvement,” it notes. The card is at https://innovation.cms.gov/media/document/hhvbp-newsletter-apr2023.