Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Technical manual should reduce reporting burdens, McClellan says.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations took another step Sept. 15 to streamline hospitals'  reporting responsibilities - and to help patients make "apples-to-apples comparisons" between facilities.

The organizations have issued a technical manual, which is a single comprehensive set of quality measures that all stakeholders can use. It provides common definitions for each of the measures that are being collected and reported. Beginning with discharges in January 2005, the common definitions will be used for both the national voluntary hospital reporting initiative and for JCAHO accreditation.

Participating hospitals currently report data on heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia. However, the technical differences between how CMS and JCAHO specified the quality measures increased hospitals' data collection and reporting burdens on hospitals, according to CMS Administrator Mark B. McClellan.

The deadline for hospitals to report quality of care data already has come and gone, with almost 100 percent of covered hospitals hopping aboard the initiative. The incentive: The threat of a 0.4-percentage point cut for staying silent.

Of 3,906 inpatient acute care hospitals, 3,839 met CMS' requirements - that's up from 3,000 reporting data at the last update, CMS said Sept. 2.

The hospital quality data, which is reported as 10 quality measures for heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia, will be available to consumers on CMS' Web site in early 2005. On the agenda for next year: Additional measures of clinical quality and patient satisfaction, though no pay update has been linked to reporting that data.

To read the new technical manual, go to http://www.cms.hhs.gov/quality/hospital.

Lesson Learned: Hospitals now have a common set of performance specifications for use in quality reporting and accreditation.