Eli's Hospice Insider

Plus: Submit your proposed rule comments by May 31.

Stats on new hospice quality measures will hit the public eye this month.

The brand-new Hospice Care Index composite measure, finalized in the 2022 hospice final rule, will go on display in May’s Care Compare update, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official noted in the April 20 Open Door Forum for home health and hospice agencies. So will the new Hospice Visits in Last Days of Life measure.

Reminder: The HCI will be comprised of claims-based data on 10 points: Continuous Home Care or General Inpatient Care Provided; Gaps in Skilled Nursing Visits; Early Live Discharges; Late Live Discharges; Burdensome Transitions Types 1 (Live Discharges from Hospice Followed by Hospitalization and Subsequent Hospice Readmission) and 2 (Live Discharges from Hospice Followed by Hospitalization with the Patient Dying in the Hospital); Per-beneficiary Medicare Spending; Skilled Nursing Care Minutes per Routine Home Care Day; Skilled Nursing Minutes on Weekends; and Visits Near Death.

The claims-based HVLDL measure replaces the Hospice Item Set data-based Hospice Visits When Death is Imminent (HVWDII) measure, CMS says in a recent message about the measure as NQF #3645 in February, CMS adds. “HVLDL reflects the proportion of hospice patients who received in-person visits from a registered nurse or a medical social worker on at least 2 of the final 3 days of life,” according to the message.

Provider preview reports were issued March 24, the CMS speaker indicated in the forum. Those reports will be in hospices’ iQIES folders for 60 days total, she explained.

CMS pushed the debut of hospice CAHPS star ratings back to the August refresh, CMS confirmed in the 2023 proposed payment rule for hospices published in the April 4 Federal Register.

Plus: Don’t forget to submit comments on the proposed rule by May 31, a CMS source told forum attendees. The rule contains a proposed 2.7 percent pay increase, a Special Focus Program targeting plan for surveys, a HOPE assessment tool update, and more (see Hospice Insider, Vol. 15, No. 5 for more rule specifics).

Instructions for submitting comments online or via mail are in the 22-page rule at www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ FR-2022-04-04/pdf/2022-07030.pdf.