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Preparing for Quality Reporting
By Terri L. Maxwell PhD, APRN, and Susan Zimmerman
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ast August, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced important new reporting requirements that NHPCO shared in a Regulatory Alert to the NHPCO membership. To briefly recap the key points: • The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Section 3004) requires hospices and other post-acute settings to submit quality data to CMS— which must be collected during 2012 and submitted to CMS in 2013. • CMS is required to reduce the 2014 market basket update by 2 percent for those hospices that do not comply with the quality reporting requirements.
• CMS intends to make hospice quality data available to the public, although no timeline has yet been given. In order to meet the new quality reporting requirements, hospices must track and report on patientspecific indicators selected by CMS and endorsed by a consensus body such as the National Quality Forum (NQF). However, CMS may also require hospices to track and report on some quality indicators which have undergone less rigorous review (and are discussed later in this article).
1. A Structural Measure that consists of two parts: Confirmation of participation in a QAPI program that includes at least three patientcare related performance measures; and descriptions of all patient-care measures in use during the data collection period. 2. NQF #0209 Measure (i.e., NHPCO’s Comfortable Dying Measure) that addresses pain brought to a comfortable level within 48 hours of initial assessment. The following table provides a snapshot of the requirements and timeline for compliance. (NHPCO has also developed a more detailed timeline which members can download from the NHPCO website.)
The Two Accepted Measures to Date
CMS has announced the first measures that will be required for quality reporting:
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http://www.nhpco.org/files/public/regulatory/Wage_Index_Final_FY2012_080111.pdfhttp://www.nhpco.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=5841http://www.nhpco.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=5841
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NewsLine - January 2012