Home Health & Hospice Week

Bid farewell to this VBP measure concerning drug education.

The Value-Based Purchasing demonstration project still won’t see a national rollout, according to the latest HH PPS proposed rule. But it will see more changes this year.

Industry observers thought the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services might be ready to launch VBP nationwide. However, in the 2018 Home Health Prospective Payment System proposed rule, CMS just makes a series of tweaks to the program, including:

• requiring that HHAs in the program only would have to submit a minimum of 40 completed Home Health Care Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey for purposes of receiving a performance score for any of the HHCAHPS measures. “We believe … that using a minimum of 40 completed HHCAHPS surveys, rather than a minimum of 20 completed HHCAHPS surveys, would better align the Model with HHCAHPS policy for the Patient Survey Star Ratings on Home Health Compare,” CMS says in the proposed rule published in the July 28 Federal Register. “The decision to use a minimum of 40 completed surveys for these star ratings was a result of balancing two competing goals. One goal was to provide star ratings that were meaningful and minimized random variations. This goal was best served by calculating star ratings for large numbers of cases by having a larger minimum of completed HHCAHPS surveys (for example, 50 or 100 completed HHCAHPS surveys).

At the same time, we also wanted to be able to provide star ratings for as many HHAs as possible. This goal was best served by using a lower minimum of completed HHCAHPS surveys (for example, 20 completed HHCAHPS surveys). We chose to balance these opposing and necessary goals by using 40 completed HHCAHPS surveys for the Patient Survey Star Ratings.”

• removing the OASIS-based measure, Drug Education on All Medications Provided to Patient/Caregiver during all Episodes of Care, from the set of applicable measures. “Many providers have achieved full performance on the Drug Education measure,” CMS reports in the rule.

• soliciting public comments “on composite quality measures for future consideration,” CMS notes in its fact sheet about the rule.

Aligning VBP scoring with the five-star category on Home Health Compare is good news, says consultant Pat Laff with Laff Associates in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. “Now people will figure out why getting to five stars is important,” he believes.