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Home Health & Hospice Week

Quality:

SHARPEN YOUR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT SKILLS

Published on Tue Sep 25, 2007

Demo will judge agencies on 7 measures.

If you haven't jumped on the bandwagon to improve hospitalization and emergency care measures for your patients, there's no time like the present.

The pay for performance demonstration set to launch Jan. 1 highlights the importance the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services places on those two home health agency quality measures. Under the demo, CMS will pay more for those two measures than any others.

That's because those two are "efficiency measures," explained Henry Goldberg with Abt Associates, CMS' contractor for the P4P demonstration project, at an Oct. 9 session of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's annual meeting in Denver. They save the Medicare program money in addition to improving patient care quality.

One down: Keen observers will note the list of demo measures has decreased by one. CMS and Abt dropped the measure on urinary incontinence. "Every-one hated that one," Goldberg observed in the session.

When deciding on which measures to include, CMS and Abt wanted measures based on reliable and valid OASIS items; that were under an agency's control; and that had room for improvement, Goldberg said.

Example: The demo list doesn't include stabilization measures because they tended to have little room to improve. "It's hard to say we'll pay you if you do better than 96 percent," he said.

The measures for the demo and their relative weights are:
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