Republished with permission from Decision Health. Article originally published on Home Health Line October 16, 2016. Whether they’re discussing QAPI, 5-star ratings or rehospitalization rates in general, more and more agencies are showcasing their quality of care when they market to referral sources, a new HHL survey shows.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the new Hospice Compare website in August. The data shows how important it is to track and manage your performance improvement program with real-time scores. With a 9 month delay expected in Hospice Compare data, your scores today will be part of the CMS benchmark through June 2019. Hospices should evaluate their highest and lowest performers for identifying best practices and remedial training accordingly.

The big news in the latest proposed rule for HH PPS was the Home Health Groupings Model (HHGM). Along with the typical recalibration to case-mix payments and case weights, did you see the significant proposals regarding the Home Health Quality Reporting Program (HH QRP)? Almost a third of the 389 pages in the rule were in regard to the HH QRP.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) penalizes hospitals for Medicare readmissions. Hospitals have difficulty tracking and managing patients after discharge. At Strategic Healthcare Programs (SHP), we look at millions of records each year from the Home Health Agency Outcome Assessment Information Set (OASIS) to correlate the patient characteristics that led to a transfer or discharge to an acute care hospital (readmission). With CMS incentives increasingly directed at reducing readmission rates, hospitals can maximize their Medicare reimbursement by selecting a post-acute care (PAC) home health care provider that uses actionable, real-time analytics.

SHP is happy to adopt the new NHIA infusion industry standards to support the data initiative for patient outcome improvement. As a result, we will be replacing our existing proprietary home infusion patient satisfaction survey with the new survey, approved and issued by NHIA, for all our current and future customers. The adoption of the NHIA survey will allow home infusion pharmacies to compare their performance to a standardized national benchmark. This will be a great benefit to home infusion pharmacies as they work with referral sources and payers, and will aid their internal organizational efforts to improve performance.

The Home Health Groupings Model (HHGM), which is the most significant change to the home health prospective payment reimbursement model since its inception, was finally released on Thursday, July 28th as part of the Home Health Payment Proposed Rule for CY 2018, although it is not scheduled to be implemented until CY 2019.

The annual SHPBest recognition program was created to acknowledge home health and hospice providers that consistently provide high quality service. We are pleased to announce the 2016 SHP Best-of-the-Best winners, who have been recognized for achieving the highest overall HHCAHPS patient satisfaction or CAHPS Hospice caregiver satisfaction scores of all eligible SHP clients during the 2016 calendar year.

Brightree LLC, a leading provider of cloud-based software, and Strategic Healthcare Programs (SHP), a leading provider of data analytics and benchmarking to post-acute care providers, have released Integrated Alerting to further enhance the existing interface between two companies.

Strategic Healthcare Programs (SHP) has released a new first-in-class comprehensive Hospice Scorecard Report suite. As hospice providers and their referral sources continue their focus on quality and with the upcoming public reporting of hospice scores, the need for real-time data increases. SHP’s Scorecard suite will enhance hospice customers’ capability to measure, manage and report on quality metrics.

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.