Part B therapy providers should check out these recommended measurement systems.
If you're furnishing outpatient therapy under Part B, you'd better get friendly with some new patient outcome tools or fall behind the pack.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recommended four therapy outcomes tools in Transmittal 63 released Dec. 29, 2006. CMS named the Activity Measure-Post Acute Care (AM-PAC) tool developed by the Boston University Health and Disability Research Institute, Focus on Therapeutic Outcomes Inc.'s FOTO Patient Inquiry, the American Speech-Language Hearing Association's National Outcomes Measurement System (NOMS), and the American Physical Therapy Association's Outpatient Physical Therapy Improvement in Movement Assessment Log (OPTIMAL) as recommended ways to measure your patients' progress.
Important: CMS doesn't require you to use any of these tools, but you should check them out. They could turn out to be your best benchmarking friend--and you might need them down the road if CMS does decide to require them.
Here are the details on two of the four therapy outcome tools. (Look for information on the remaining two therapy outcome tools in next week's issue of Eli's Home Care Week.) AM-PAC Has Home Health Slant Who it's for: Home care providers may be most interested in AM-PAC, which is best suited for the post-acute care patient. That includes home health, outpatient therapy, inpatient rehabilitation and skilled nursing settings that treat post-acute patients, clarifies Alan Jette, director of the Boston University Health and Disability Research Institute.
How it works: AM-PAC includes a comprehensive list of 240 functional activities that examine daily tasks an average adult would encounter. The instrument then organizes the tasks into three scales: basic mobility, daily activity and applied cognition. "AM-PAC can be completed by the patient or the therapist, but it usually depends on the setting and the patient's cognitive status," Jette says. A facility may also choose between a paper-based AM-PAC and a freestanding Web-based Computer Adaptive Test (CAT).
Extra: CMS has mentioned AM-PAC in a report on the development of a Uniform Patient Assess-ment for Post-Acute Care and notes that companies such as Merck, HealthSouth, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California and SeniorMetrix use AM-PAC for its functional domains. For more information on AM-PAC, visit
www.crecare.com/ampac.html.
Cost: Your facility can obtain a license for the paper-based form at $250, while the CAT version of AM-PAC is $600. Get Benchmarking-Serious With FOTO Who it's for: Mostly physical therapists turn to FOTO's Patient Inquiry because of its strong musculoskeletal focus, according to experts. But FOTO can also extend to occupational therapy and speech-language pathology because it addresses some neurological function, clarifies therapist Al Amato, president of Focus On Therapeutic Outcomes Inc. As far as rehab settings best suited for using FOTO, Amato says that users span the entire [...]
