Home Health & Hospice Week

Are you ready for another evaluation in addition to OASIS?

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will soon test a patient assessment tool across post-acute care settings, and if CMS officials like it, you could have more paperwork on your hands.

The Continuity Assessment Record and Evaluation (CARE) tool takes the "best" items from OASIS, nursing homes' MDS and rehab facilities' patient assessment tool, CMS' Mary Weakland said at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's Washington, DC policy conference April 23.

The aim is for hospital discharge planners to be able to use the tool to help place patients in the appropriate setting. The tool would be filled out before hospital discharge, upon admission to a post-acute setting such as home care, nursing home or rehab, and again upon discharge from that post-acute provider.

The idea is to track the patient across settings, Weakland explained. CMS and NAHC are soliciting agencies to participate in the Chicago demonstration project starting in January.

Concern: Conference attendees voiced worries about inter-rater reliability between assessments conducted by different providers. The demonstration will be evaluating just such issues, Weakland assured.

The CARE tool "will collect information that will enable CMS to better understand the relationships among patient needs, post-acute care placement, patient outcomes, and post-acute care related costs in the Medicare program," CMS says in a notice in the April 19 Federal Register regarding the assessment tool.

End goal: CMS is trying to formulate "a proposal for site-neutral payment for post-acute care services," the agency says in the notice. In other words, nursing homes, HHAs, rehab facilities and other providers would receive the same payment for a post-acute patient.