Home Health & Hospice Week

Florida leads the way on lagging HHAs.

The red tape that comes along with the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing pilot may be keeping some affected home health agencies from participating — at least so far.

Back in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ March 9 Home Health Open Door Forum, staffer Marcie O’Reilly said about 80 percent of HHAs in the nine pilot states had registered a Primary Point of Contact (PPOC) for HH VBP. That figure is now up to about 83 percent for each uniqueCCN in those states, O’Reilly said in the May 4 Forum.

Not surprisingly, the state with the most agencies overall is also the state with the most providers that haven’t registered a PPOC, O’Reilly related. Florida has 281 HHAs that haven’t registered. The other states’ unregistered numbers are 41 in Massachusetts, 22 in Arizona, 12 in Iowa, 10 in Tennessee, six in Nebraska, three in Washington and one in Maryland. All HHAs in North Carolina have registered, she said.

Reminder: HHAs cannot register for the HH VBP Secure Portal website until they have a PPOC on record, O’Reilly cautioned. Only 275 PPOCs have successfully registered for Secure Portal access.

If they act now, agencies still have time to register their PPOC and gain access to the Secure Portal website before the May 12 live virtual tour of the site, O’Reilly emphasized.

Resource: Instructions on registering your PPOC and for the CMS Secure Portal site are at https://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/home-health-value-based-purchasing-model.

HHAs will receive agency-specific benchmarking reports under VBP in July, O’Reilly confirmed in response to a caller question. But providers can access general benchmarking information with statelevel data now on CMS’s HH VBP Connect site.

Barrier: A few providers called in reporting problems registering their PPOCs. The Experian identity verification process requires PPOCs to furnish their Social Security Number to pull up their credit report and ask verification questions, CMS confirmed.

PPOCs who don’t have a credit history can call the VBP Help Desk to undergo a manual verification process instead, O’Reilly offered. One caller reported trouble accessing that process.