DeVero

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You might think you know what your partners want (and, as mentioned above, you might be able to provide them with some data that could be useful to them even if they don’t know what they want), but those individuals who are referring patients to you may not know the goals of their organization, or may not understand them. Data gets you in front of referral partners Your referral partners care about data and what it looks like, even if some of them don’t know how to formulate and organize it for their benefit. Stover recommends drafting reports that document information, such as the number of referrals received; the number of patients admitted; the start of care for each patient; the number of 30-day admissions; as well as providing a short executive summary of the information to make consumption of the data easier to understand. For example, consider providing pre-discharge consultation; establishing a response time for meeting patients at the care facility; creating a flexible intake process; meeting patients and family upon discharge (if possible); front loading visits and shifts; and helping patients get back to the primary care physicians and alerting PCPs that you have their patient in your care and would like to coordinate for transitional care billing.

The final rule updates the home health (HH PPS) payment rates, including the national, standardized 60-day episode payment rates, the national per-visits rates, and the non-routine medical supply (NRS) conversion factor effective for home health episodes of care ending on or after Jan. 1, 2018. The rule updates the HH PPS case-mix weights using the most current, complete data available at the time of rulemaking; and implements the third-year of a three-year phase in of a reduction to the national, standardized 60-day episode payment to account for estimated case-mix growth between CY 2012 and CY 2014. This rule also makes case-mix methodology refinements, as well as provides a change in the unit of payment from 60-day episodes of care to 30-days periods of care to be implemented from home health services beginning on or after Jan. 1, 2019. For all payment updates, agencies risk losing 2 percent in the next calendar year for failure to submit quality data; agencies must submit 90 percent of quality data.

Although the Hospice Quality Reporting Program (HQRP) began in August 2017 with the Hospice Item Set (HIS) scores being made public on the Hospice Compare website, hospices still have limited information about the trends and changes in scores since HIS and the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Hospice Survey began. The big changes, however, include a new “composite” measure and a new measure set for “hospice visits when death is imminent”, which will come from HIS 2.0, and CMS said it plans to continue to pursue new data collection considerations post-HIS 2.0. * O5030: Number of hospice visits in three to six days prior to death Trends and Benchmarks in HIS and CAHPS Hospice Data According to data collected from SHP’s database of 1,400 hospices, Zeb Clayton, vice president of client service at SHP, CAHPS hospice data even in the first year the scores were the highest, but they have come down a bit. For example, the percent of routine home care visits in last three days of life were provided by an aide or an RN. For those patients receiving two visits in the last seven days of life, 76.1 percent met the measure; 13.7 percent of all patients had only one visit; 9.6 percent had one or more visits but not from a qualifying discipline; .6 percent had no visits.