MDS Alert

Reader Questions:

Run This Report to Confirm Your MDS Submissions

Question: I’ve recently accepted a job as an MDS coordinator. Is there any way to make sure that the MDS assessment forms I’m filing and submitting are actually going through?

Minnesota Subscriber

Answer: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recommends running final validation reports to make sure your submissions have been accepted to QIES.

CMS says: “Detailed guidance on how to run and interpret MDS reports can be found in the CASPER Reporting User’s Guide. Select “Section 7 – Final Validation Report” to open the PDFs. An additional resource is the MDS 3.0 Provider User’s Guide, available on the same page. Refer to Section 4 for information on submission reports.”

Make sure you look for dashes (-) when reviewing your error messages, because the presence of a dash as the value submission for a quality measure means you should look to make a correction, CMS says.