Home Health & Hospice Week

Encore webinar spawns new Q&A set.

If the imminent arrival of Value-Based Purchasing on Jan. 1, in addition to OASIS-E, new billing edits, and much more, has you feeling overwhelmed, a new tool from Medicare may help.

“The Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) Technical Assistance (TA) Team is pleased to announce the availability of a new organizational self-assessment resource,” it says in a message to providers. That resource is the “Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) Program Self-Assessment,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services explains in the message.

What is it? The self-assessment is intended “for use by home health agency (HHA) teams as a brief, self-guided, performance improvement activity based on structured review of expanded HHVBP Model performance data by measure category,” CMS says. “The forms included in the workbook create simple data visualizations that will allow teams to see patterns in measure performance by category,” the agency explains. “Teams will self-assess their HHA’s performance by measure category for use in planning performance improvement activities.”

Reminder: “Medicare-certified home health agencies (HHAs) are required to develop, implement, evaluate, and maintain an effective, ongoing, HHA-wide, data-driven Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) program,” CMS says in the 10-page self-assessment tool. “An effective QAPI program is essential for success under the expanded HHVBP Model and for the long-term viability of competing HHAs,” it adds.

The self-assessment should take about 30 minutes of prep and about 30 minutes of active review, CMS advises.

Snag: The self-assessment requires quality data, including “Expanded HHVBP Model performance reports,” the tool notes. But CMS doesn’t expect to issue such agency-specific reports until next summer at the earliest.

HHAs can use their own quality data, however, CMS offers.

The tool is at https://innovation.cms.gov/media/document/hhvbp-qapi-self-assessment.

Another resource: Keep an eye out for the question-and-answer set coming from CMS’ Oct. 11 live encore of its Aug. 25 webinar: Navigating Performance Feedback Reports: Interim Performance Report (IPR) and Annual Performance Report (APR). CMS held the encore because a technical problem kept a number of HHAs from being able to join the earlier webinar.

While the slides and content were the same, CMS will post a new set of Q&As soon, it says. In the meantime, you can refer to the Aug. 25 Q&A set at https://innovation.cms.gov/media/document/hhvbp-8-25-22-event-qa.

A number of the questions ask about when agencies will receive their cohort assignments, baseline data, and other specifics. CMS reiterates that that information will come “as soon administratively possible,” aka next summer.