Eli's Hospice Insider

New data will go up next February.

Don’t be surprised to find out newer data than you think will be going up on Care Compare for your hospice.

Background: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has previously announced that it would freeze public reporting of quality data for 2021 based on 2020 data collected during the onset of the COVID-19 public health emergency. “For Q1 and Q2 2020, we determined that we would not use HIS or CAHPS data from these quarters for public reporting given the timing of the PHE onset,” CMS reviews in the 2022 hospice payment rule published in the April 14 Federal Register. Public reporting will resume with a February 2022 refresh of Care Compare.

To avoid using outdated data, CMS ran analyses and decided to use three quarters of HIS data for that refresh — Q3 and Q4 from 2020 and Q1 from 2021. “Using 3 quarters of data for the February 2022 refresh would allow us to begin displaying Q3 2020, Q4 2020, and Q1 2021 data in February 2022, rather than continue displaying November 2020 data (Q1 2019 through Q4 2019),” CMS details. “Updating the data in February 2022 by more than a year relative to the November 2020 freeze data would assist consumers by providing more relevant quality data and allow hospices to demonstrate more recent performance.”

The CAHPS public reporting data picture is a little more complicated, because it includes eight quarters of data rather than four. “We propose to continue to report the most recent 8 quarters of available data after the freeze, but not to include the data from the exempted quarters of Q1 and Q2 of 2020,” the rule says.

In other words, public reporting will skip over Q1 and Q2 of 2020, and will reach back to the most recent quarters before that to complete the eight quarters, a CMS staffer explained in the agency’s April 13 Open Door Forum for home health and hospice agencies.

Note: The rule is at www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-04-14/pdf/2021-07344.pdf