Home Health & Hospice Week

Plus: CMS offers medication management educational recording.

Why it matters: Home health agencies’ VBP scores in 2023 will affect their payments in 2025, to the tune of up to 5 percent positive or negative.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released HHAs’ first IPR on July 21. The report “provides feedback to HHAs about their measure performance relative to achievement thresholds, benchmarks, improvement thresholds, and the performance of their cohort,” CMS explains in a new IPR Quick Reference Guide.

The IPR includes:

1. The HHA’s interim measure performance scores and an interim Total Performance Score (TPS), if an HHA has sufficient data to allow calculation of at least five of the 12 measures to calculate a TPS;
2. Improvement, achievement, and care points reflecting the HHA’s performance relative to their own performance and the performance of other HHAs in their cohort, including the achievement thresholds and benchmarks for the HHA’s cohort;
3. Measure scorecard information to support HHAs with understanding how each individual measure contributes to their interim TPS; and
4. A Total Normalized Composite (TNC) Change Reference tab to assist HHAs in understanding their performance on the individual OASIS items included in the two TNC measures.

What it’s not: “HHA performance results shown in the IPR are not used to compute payment adjustments for HHAs competing in the expanded HHVBP Model,” CMS stresses in the guide. “Payment adjustment information will be available in the Annual Performance Report (APR), published annually beginning August 2024,” the agency explains.

The IPR is still important, however, because it gives agencies an idea of how they are competing and where they need to improve. It also gives them a chance to correct any mistakes.

But agencies must be quick to do so. “To dispute the calculation of performance measures or interim TPS in the Preliminary IPR, an HHA must submit a recalculation request within 15 calendar days after publication of the Preliminary IPR,” CMS instructs in the guide.

“The Final IPR will reflect any changes resulting from an approved recalculation,” trade group LeadingAge explains in a post on its website.

HHAs can find their IPRs in their CASPER folders in iQIES, CMS notes.