Summary of the CMS Open Door Forum on June 29

From NAHC (Redacted by HHAC)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) held a Home Health, Hospice, and DME Open Door Forum on June 29, 2022. The summary of the Forum applicable to home health and hospice providers is below.

Home Health

CMS provided a high-level summary of the CY 2023 Home Health PPS Rule.  (See the NAHC Report article here for a detailed summary and here for a link to the recording of the webinar conducted by NAHC’s Bill Dombi and Mary Carr where the proposals are discussed.)

The draft OASIS-E Guidance Manual was released in May as were OASIS-E Q&As.

Also recently posted was the June Expanded Home Health Value Based Purchasing Model newsletter and FAQs. CMS indicated they intend to have a sample interim report and sample performance report  for the expanded model available in iQIES soon, and there will be a webinar in August that walks through these sample reports.

Those providers that believe they are exempt from the home health CAHPS because they have had 59 or fewer patients from the period of April 2021 through March 2022, need to complete the Participation Exemption Request Form for the annual payment update for calendar year 2024. Additional exemption information is found here.

Hospice

CMS reminded hospices that the August refresh of Care Compare will include the two new claims-based measures – Hospice Visits in Last Days of Life and Hospice Care Index.  These measures were slated to be publicly reported with the May refresh of Care Compare but this was pushed back to August due to errors in the Provider Preview Reports for these measures issued in March. Therefore, hospices are to disregard the preview reports for March.  Corrected preview reports are available now.

The reconsideration period for the FY2023 annual payment update (APU) hospice quality reporting program (HQRP) requirements is coming up.  Hospice providers will receive notification from their Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC) if they are subject to the APU penalty, and they will also receive notification in their CASPER folder.

There was some concern expressed by hospice participants in the ODF that the Care Compare website currently reflects that data for the HCI and HVLDL is suppressed upon request from the agency. This is not accurate as CMS suppressed the data due to an error in the preview reports, as stated above. CMS indicated that there is an additional update to the footnotes that will be pushed out soon and should provide some additional clarity on this situation for the public.

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