Eli's Hospice Insider

CMS may post deadline outside of rulemaking, it says.

Medicare continues to move forward with its plan to assign star ratings to hospices on a Hospice Compare website.

In its 2016 final payment rule for hospices, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services confirms that it plans to publicly report hospice quality data derived from the new HIS and CAHPS requirements. But CMS still isn’t committing to when the new rating system will start.

“We recognize that public reporting of quality data is a vital component of a robust quality reporting program and are fully committed to developing the necessary systems for public reporting of hospice quality data,” CMS says in the rule published in the Aug. 6 Federal Register. The data must be “meaningful” and “collected in a standardized and uniform manner.”

CMS is taking its time to verify the early data hospices are submitting. “We believe it is critical to establish the reliability and validity of the quality measures prior to public reporting in order to demonstrate the ability of the quality measures to distinguish the quality of services provided,” the agency explains. That will take “at least four quarters of data” for analysis.

Date: “Decisions about whether to report some or all of the quality measures publicly will be based on the findings of analysis of the CY 2015 data,” CMS says. No deadline has been determined, but CMS may post a star rating timeline before the 2017 rulemaking cycle, the agency says. In the meantime, “CMS anticipates that provider-level quality reports will begin to be available sometime in CY 2015,” it says.

See the rule at www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2015-08-06/pdf/2015-19033.pdf.