What does CMS have in store for the Home Health (HH) industry in CY 2021? PDGM will stay the course, good news for most agencies, whose operations have been mired with the impacts of COVID-19. Looking at the SHP National database for the first six months compared to the CMS PDGM model, there are clearly some behavioral changes that we are beginning to observe. Changes related to comorbidity adjustment, functional impairment, and LUPA rates are highlighted in the blog.

The annual SHPBest™ award program was created to recognize home health and hospice providers that consistently provide outstanding performance in patient and caregiver satisfaction. SHP would like to congratulate the 2019 SHP Best-of-the-Best winners, who have been acknowledged for achieving the highest overall HHCAHPS patient satisfaction or CAHPS Hospice caregiver satisfaction scores of all eligible SHP clients during the 2019 calendar year.

Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced in their Interim Final with Comment Rule a delay in the implementation of OASIS-E which was slated to begin on January 1, 2021. This is good news for Home Health Agencies (HHAs) that have been consumed with the impact of COVID-19 as part of the Public Health Emergency (PHE).

On March 18, 2020 the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that the draft OASIS-E instrument is now available on their OASIS Data Sets webpage. All clinical assessments will use the new tool as of January 1, 2021. As part of the IMPACT Act, CMS has been updating OASIS data elements to enable post-acute care (PAC) providers to report standardized patient assessment data, new quality measures, and data on resource utilization. The intent is interoperability which allows for the exchange of data using common standards and definitions, facilitates coordinated care, and improves outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries.

CMS has begun the process to remove the measure, Frequency of Pain Interfering with Patients Activities or Movement (“Pain”) from the Home Health Quality Reporting Program (HH QRP), as part of an effort to address the national Opioid crises. The Pain measure will no longer be publicly reported on HHC, Star Ratings, CASPER reporting, or any other QAPI program. How might this affect your star ratings? Read on.

SHP is pleased to announce a new suite of financial reporting to help home health agencies improve efficiency and maximize margin under the PDGM. The new PDGM Stay Detail and Period Detail reports show patient data within PDGM Core Categories at the home health stay level, and at the 30-day payment period level. They help guide visit utilization management, LUPA tracking, margin analysis, efficiency of functional improvement, and much more.

SHP is pleased to announce the release of our completely redesigned HHRG Worksheet tool. Since HHRGs have been completely overhauled with PDGM, SHP has took the opportunity to re-engineer the report to support the new payment rules and highlight potential revenue opportunities within the PDGM components. It is designed to explore the variety of factors which contribute to the HHRG score for patients. It provides a complete look into the HHRG, Case Mix Weight, and the Total Revenue for the payment period.

Our most heavily utilized report, Episode Einstein℠, just got a major upgrade to support the new payment model. Compare multiple assessments in a home health patient’s stay to monitor patient progress and improvement opportunities. The marriage of clinical and financial details make this a great case conference tool.

Finally, after a couple of years of preparation and anticipation, the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) is underway. It’s a little early to get a read on how agencies are doing under PDGM, but one area I was curious about was how much agencies improved on coding “unacceptable” diagnoses (formerly known as Questionable Encounters, or QEs).

The CY 2020 Home Health Payment System Rate final rule was published last week and, as expected, the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) will be implemented for 30-day periods of care starting on or after January 1, 2020. The good news is that CMS reduced the behavioral adjustment to 4.36%, just over half of the revised 8.39% estimates. Read our blog for highlights on the final rule, plus insights and predictions for what's to come.