Eli's Hospice Insider

Use free resources to increase your HIS compliance.

If you leave an important step off your Hospice Item Set procedure, you may pay the price.

As part of the HIS reporting requirements, hospices must submit required HIS-Admission and HIS-Discharge records to the CMS Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (QIES) Assessment Submission and Processing (ASAP) system, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a recent email to providers. “Following file upload, providers should review system-generated Final Validation reports in the CASPER Reporting application to verify that all records were successfully processed without error,” CMS instructs.

Don’t miss: “To demonstrate compliance with HIS reporting requirements, providers should print and retain Final Validation reports as evidence of successful submission and processing of HIS records,” CMS stresses. “If a Final Validation report demonstrating successful submission and processing is not received following file upload, this indicates that the relevant HIS record was not received by CMS and you may not be in compliance with HIS reporting requirements.”

Remember, starting Jan. 1, if you fail to submit at least 70 percent of all required HIS records within a 30-day submission timeframe, you’ll face a 2 percent reduction to your market basket update for Fiscal Year 2018. That threshold goes up to 80 percent in 2017 and 90 percent in 2018, according to the 2016 hospice final rule published in the Aug. 6 Federal Register.

Resource: If you haven’t gotten up to speed on the latest HIS requirements, you can do so conveniently from your own computer. CMS has posted four training modules on the data reporting tool.

CMS originally offered the training in June. The sessions cover the HIS Manual v1.02 and the various sections of the tool. Links for the presentations posted to CMS’s YouTube channel are at www.cms.gov/Outreach-and-Education/Outreach/NPC/NPC-Video-Presentations.html .

Heed Hospice Item Set Pointers From CMS

Tip: If you haven’t set up a HIS core team, you’re not following CMS’s advice on the data set.

“Choose a core team to execute HIS data collection and HIS record conversion and submission, based on the expertise needed for the task,” CMS advises in a new “Lessons Learned and Best Practices” section of its updated HIS fact sheet.

You should use that team to train and serve as a resource for the rest of your staff, CMS recommends in the three-page sheet at https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Hospice-Quality-Reporting/Downloads/Fact-Sheet-Getting-Started-with-the-HIS-–-Checklist-and-Quick-Tips.pdf .