Eli's Hospice Insider

Published on Thu Jan 21, 2021 PDF

You can now get a more comprehensive look at the newest proposed quality measure for hospices.

In its “Measures Under Consideration” (MUC) list, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services outlines the measure it unveiled last year, the Hospice Care Index. “The Hospice Care Index monitors a broad set of leading, claims-based indicators of hospice care processes,” CMS explains in the list. “The ten indicators reflect care throughout the hospice stay and by the care team within the domains of higher levels of care, visits by nursing staff, patterns of live discharge, and per-beneficiary spending.”

CMS adds a few details on methodology too. “Index scores are calculated as the total instances a hospice exceeds a threshold for each of the 10 indicators. The index thereby seeks to identify hospices which are outliers across an array of multifaceted indicators, simultaneously,” the report indicates. Hospices with less than 20 discharges in a year won’t be assigned an index score, CMS plans.

More details for the measure, MUC20-0030, are in the 85-page list report at www.cms.gov/files/document/measures-under-consideration-list-2020-report.pdf.

What’s next: The National Quality Forum’s Measures Application Partnership began review of the MUC list last month will have a public meeting about the measures on Jan. 15, will “deliver its measure recommendations to CMS by February 2021 and publish its reports in March 2021,” NQF says in a release.