Eli's Hospice Insider

Vital hospice instructions about the new requirement are coming soon.

The deadline for submitting data for voluntary hospice quality reporting is almost upon providers, but Medicare has yet to issue any details about the program.

Hospices can expect to see the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issue a user manual and helpline for the program in November, CMS's Robin Dowell told attendees of the Aug. 17 Open Door Forum for home care providers. Data collection will start in January and will reflect data from the fourth quarter of 2011.

CMS will post the information on its new website for the quality reporting requirement at www.cms.gov/ltch-irf-hospice-quality-reporting, Dowell explained.

"We encourage hospices to participate in the voluntary data submission period," Dowell said. The voluntary reporting will be for the structural measure, "Participation in a Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) Program that Includes at Least Three Quality Indicators Related to Patient Care."

When mandatory reporting starts in 2013, CMS will require the QAPI measure and a measure addressing pain management.

Right now CMS is planning to have hospices submit their voluntary data via a web-based interface, Dowell said.

Old way: Finally, the hospice rule changes which hospice physicians can perform the face-to-face encounter, pointed out CMS's Lori Anderson in the forum. In last year's hospice final rule, CMS had said the physician conducting the F2F encounter had to be the one recertifying the terminal illness.

New way: Now any hospice physician may conduct the F2F visit, Anderson noted in the forum (for more details, see Eli's Hospice Insider, Vol. 4, No. 9). CMS had already made this change in its manuals, she added.