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

The Office of Management & Budget (OMB) has issued the information collection packet for the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS)-E, which includes three attachments and the Supporting Statement document outlining the burden estimate for both home health agencies and the federal government.

The OASIS-E assessment tool is effective January 1, 2023.

Attachment A is an OASIS-E change table that compares the changes made to OASIS-E from the OASIS-D. Attachment B includes all of the OASIS items, and Attachment C is an itemized list of the OASIS-E data elements.

As usual, in the supporting statement, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) underestimates the burden for HHAs to complete the OASIS-E data set. CMS projects that assessment items in the data set will take a range of 0.15-0.3 (9-18 seconds respectively) minutes of clinician time to complete.

• Estimated time spent per each OASIS-E Start of Care (SOC) Assessment/Patient = 57.3 clinician minutes for 203 data elements
• Resumption of Care (ROC) Assessment/Patient = 48 minutes for 172 data elements
• Estimated time spent per each OASIS-E Follow-Up (FU) Assessment/Patient = 13.2 minutes for 4 data elements
• Estimated time spent per each OASIS-E Discharge (DC) Assessment/Patient = 40.2 minutes for 146 data elements

This assumption provides that even the most complex assessment items (e.g., the GG items and the new cognition items) will require 18 seconds to complete at most.

CMS also reveals changes it plans to propose for the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) in the 2023 home health payment update rule. Pending the adoption of these changes, CMS will add the following items to the FU assessment.

• Shower/bathe self
• Upper body dressing
• Lower body dressing
• Putting on/taking off footwear
• Car transfer
• Walk 150 feet
• 12 steps
• Wheel 150

Public comments on the OASIS-E information collection are due April 11, 2022.