Home Health Care News publishes "How Home Health Can Win the Readmissions Numbers Game" using SHP's data and from insights gained during recent webinar presented by SHP's Zeb Clayton and Chris Attaya.

Strategic Healthcare Programs (SHP) is getting ready to release a Hospice Scorecard reporting suite that will be made available to all hospice organizations that utilize the SHP for Hospice solution. This unique suite of reports will meet hospices’ pressing need to measure, manage, and report quality by Case Manager, Team, Referral Source, Primary Payer, Primary Diagnosis, and more.

2017 will be an important year for the Hospice Quality Reporting Program (HQRP). CMS plans to publicly share quality scores on a Hospice Compare website starting this year. On January 18th, CMS provided a full day of training to providers in Baltimore to share information on HQRP. Along with this on-site presentation, CMS live-streamed the event online to allow as many hospices as possible to participate. Here are some of the highlights...

On January 18th, CMS presented a slideshow through their Medicare Learnings Network on a possible new payment refinement to home health care reimbursement called the Home Health Groupings Model (HHGM). This was the second call in six months where Abt Associates, CMS’ contractor, shared the HHGM background in addition to the 178 page technical report they issued in November 2016. This sure seems to be picking up speed.

After seeing promising preliminary results, our customer Amedisys is expanding a pilot program that aims to lower overall costs through fewer readmissions. The outcomes from the pilot and future results from the program will be evaluated against Strategic Healthcare Programs' (SHP) benchmark data on 3 metrics: hospital readmission rates, functional status of the patient and shortness of breath.

SHP has released its new Home Infusion Pharmacy solution. This innovative product replaces SHP’s first generation reporting suite to bring real-time, interactive reports to home infusion pharmacies to help home infusion pharmacies improve quality and performance.

CMS issued the Final CY 2017 Home Health PPS Rate Update in the Federal Register on November 3rd. All of the proposals to update the VBP program were finalized with no changes regardless of stakeholder comments, except for one...

Now that a full year of CAHPS Hospice data from the SHP database is available, we would like to share those results with you.

With provider and industry comments now in, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will take the next 60 days to evaluate and make any suggested changes in the Home Health CY 2017 Final Rule.

Value-Based Purchasing: CMS says “No” to 4 new measures.