Courtesy of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC)

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) provided some important quality updates during the recent Home Health, Hospice & Durable Medicare Equipment (DME) Open Door Forum (ODF) that took place on Tuesday, December 14, 2021. What follows is a detailed summary of those updates from NAHC.

Home Health Quality Reporting Program Updates

The reconsideration period for the most recent Annual Payment Update (APU) penalty notifications has passed. CMS is actively reviewing the reconsiderations requests received.

CMS will resume home health public reporting with the January 2022 Care Compare refresh. For the refresh, home health measures scores will be based on three quarters due to the Public Health Emergency (PHE) exemption. Provider Preview Reports (PPR) for the January 2022 refresh were released last month. Additionally, the Home Health Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HHCAHPS) Survey Preview Reports are now available online.

OASIS-E Coming in 2023

Home health agencies should note that OASIS-E will be implemented on January 1, 2023. There have been some questions about this due to the extension of the PHE and the renewal of the OASIS-D, but January 1, 2023, is the implementation date. CMS solidified this date in the 2022 home health final rule.

The next interim Quality Assessment Only (QAO) performance report will be available in the Internet Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (iQIES) on January 1, 2022. It will include OASIS assessments completed during the period of October 1, 2020, through September 30, 2021.

Registration is now open for the HHCAHPS Survey Vendor Update Training as is the registration for the 2022 Introduction to the Home Health Care CAHPS Survey Training. The trainings take place in January and vendors are required to participate. Home health agencies and members of the public are welcome to participate. See the HHCAHPS survey website for registration information for both trainings.

CMS received Office of Management & Budget (OMB) approval for an HHCAHPS survey mode experiment testing a revised and shortened version of the survey and a web-based mode for the survey. CMS plans to begin data collection next spring.

Additionally, the next data submission deadline for HHCAHPS survey vendors is January 20, 2022. All home health agencies are encouraged to confirm that their data has been successfully submitted.