Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Bathing, ambulation, oral meds in the national spotlight.  The Oct. 21 deadline for national rollout of the home health quality initiative may be pushed back, but it's still likely to be only a matter of days until the public is comparing home health agencies' patient outcomes. Physicians, discharge planners, patients and the public at large will be able to log onto Medicare's Home Health Compare Web site to look at patient outcomes soon after the original Oct. 21 launch date, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services spokesperson said in the Oct. 7 Open Door Forum for home health. The delay is due to the difficulty in coordinating both CMS Administrator Tom Scully's and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson's schedules so they can appear at the kickoff, not to the readiness of the Web site. As part of the project's national launch, CMS will place about 65 paid advertisements in newspapers across the country, the CMS official said. The ads will compare three outcomes among area home health agencies - getting better at moving and walking around, getting better at taking medicines correctly by mouth, and getting better at bathing. Those are the same three outcomes featured in ads for the pilot HHQI project, which ran for eight states beginning in May. On the Home Health Compare Web site, consumers can look at all 11 of an agency's publicly reported patient outcomes once the project starts. The ads also will explain briefly what home care is and will refer readers to the Home Health Compare Web site for more information.

Expect to Find Errors in Preview Data  Agencies will have a chance to see their data before the public does. CMS already has put the HHQI reports in a folder in HHAs' QIES mailboxes. From the OASIS system welcome page, CMS' Lori Anderson instructed in the Oct. 3 satellite broadcast, HHAs should: click on "online reports," enter their usual user ID numbers and passwords on the CASPER page, click on the "folders" button at the top of the CASPER welcome page, and click on the folder that begins with an asterisk (*), which will contain the preview data for Home Health Compare. If an HHA manager finds an error in her demographic information - agency name, address, phone number and services provided - she must submit a request in writing to her state OSCAR/ASPEN coordinator to update her records, CMS' Mary Weakland said in the nearly two-and-a-half hour HHQI broadcast. The Home Health Compare Web site pulls its demographic data from those state-maintained survey records. CMS sent state survey agencies a memo instructing them to make the updates, even if they're not related to a survey. Agencies can refer [...]