The home health industry is six months away from the new Patient-Driven Grouping Model (PDGM). There is a lot of educational content available to help agencies prepare but much of it reports on PDGM metrics and payments using average values. Using 30-day periods as an overall average can be misleading. It is more meaningful to break out this data into the sequence of periods across groupings like clinical category. In this way one can analyze the impacts of periods to help define the clinical and operational improvements necessary to manage your agencies under PDGM.

CMS announced on their Medicare Learning Network (MLN) national call a proposed change to the Quality of Patient Care (QoPC) Star Ratings starting next year. CMS has proposed to eliminate the “Drug Education on all Medications Provided to Patient/Caregiver” measure and add the “Improvement in Management of Oral Medications” measure to the QoPC algorithm. What seems to be overlooked with these subtle changes is how often Star Ratings by provider change each quarter.

At their December 14th HH QRP webinar, CMS announced the deletion of the Influenza Immunization Received for Current Flu Season measure from the algorithm in calculating the home health Quality of Patient Care (QoPC) Star ratings. CMS made this after the month-long comment period ended in November 2017. The change will take effect in the April 2018 Home Health Compare (HHC) refresh.

CMS recently announced they were establishing a new technical expert panel (TEP) to review the Quality of Patient Care Star Ratings.

With the addition of Star Ratings to Home Health Compare this year, agencies now have an indicator of overall clinical quality.

What’s not to love about CMS’ star rating system for home health? Plenty.

Earlier this month CMS provided many updates with the release of the 2016 final rule and Value-Based Purchasing program. However, home health agencies are still waiting for vital information they need to determine their agency’s overall quality.

CMS made the Star Rating Preview Reports available within the last two weeks. Where does your agency fall in the ratings?

CMS announced an additional set of Star Ratings for HHCAHPS.