We recently hosted a webinar “How Will You Score Under the New CMS Hospice Item Set (HIS)?” More than 450 hospice professionals attended a preview of the impact of HIS on benchmarks that they’ll be up against in 2014.

Using data collected from SHP clients who are using our hospice data analysis and benchmarking solution, we were able to fairly closely approximate the HIS measures and determine how well hospices are documenting their care and processes in key areas covered by the new item set. The new HIS covers pain, dyspnea, treatment preferences, beliefs/values and bowel regimen.

Let’s see how hospices have done over the last year:

• Pain and dyspnea (SOB) are not documented consistently. Documentation of pain is 77 percent at admission and dyspnea is 75 percent.
• Hospices score very high at 99 percent when it comes to documenting patient and family treatment preferences for hospitalization and CPR.
• Hospices are asking about spiritual beliefs and values only 73 percent of the time, according to results from the Family Evaluation of Care (FEHC) survey.

One critical way hospices can begin to immediately prepare for HIS is by making sure they solidify their documentation processes. It will be essential to have a means to easily identify the clinicians with documentation issues along with the patients (and their caregivers) that slipped through the cracks and determine the cause of any issues that exist.

Our Winning Wednesday Webinar focused on these areas and offered seven actions hospices can take now to prepare for HIS. Hospices can obtain the “How Will You Score Under the New CMS Hospice Item Set?” presentation by emailing marketing@SHPdata.com, and customers can login to their SHPUniversity accounts for access.