Will CMS’s Star Ratings Improve Home Health Agencies’ Quality?
By - The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published the first star ratings for Home Health Agencies on Medicare.gov. As the significance of a rating system is essential to the lives of many – from considering restaurant reviews to the legitimacy of an online purchase – the healthcare industry is not a stranger to the idea of openly assessing quality measures.
CMS’s news trails a proposal released last week to launch a new Home Health Value Based Purchasing model to enhance the quality of care Medicare beneficiaries receive.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandates consumers and their families have access and choice via standardized websites to a plethora of information about quality measures to help enhance communication and knowledge across all healthcare spectrums.
CMS says when healthcare consumers are faced with an urgent decision, they are currently bombarded with too much information that inhibits their decision making. Is “too much of a good thing” – too many measures to consider and simply too much information – a detriment that is pushing the healthcare industry backwards?
“Recognizing that the information posted on HHC is very important to home health agencies and other stakeholders in addition to consumers,” CMS confirms, “CMS has been committed to assuring that all stakeholders have an opportunity to learn about the development of the star ratings and to give their input so that the system can reflect the perspectives of those who use it or are affected by it, based on a transparent development process.”
Will CMS’s star ratings improve Home Health Agencies’ quality? The answer falls heavily into the unknown. Frequently updated star ratings prove valuable to healthcare consumers, consumer advocates, health care providers, and many others, according to CMS. Aside from assisting consumers select a healthcare provider, star ratings allow home health agencies (HHAs) to more clearly pinpoint advancement opportunities.
As RevCycleIntelligence.com reported, there is fruitful debate regarding whether or not star ratings promote effective transparency. Some hospitals are turning their nose up at the idea, saying reducing a hospital’s hard work to a mere graphic and an incredibly complex system of arbitrary measurements is a frustrating notion, as HealthITAnalytics reported.
Nonetheless, more information help promote more intelligent decision making, says CMS. “Public reporting is a key driver for improving health care quality by supporting consumer choice and incentivizing provider quality improvement,” says CMS. The Home Health Compare website reports a total of 29 process, outcome, and patient experience of care quality measures. The Quality of Patient Care Star Rating highlights 9 of these measures into one collective star rating which is readily available online to healthcare consumers, CMS explains.
The 9 highlights that embody one singular star are as follows:
- Timely initiation of care
- Drug education on all medications provided to patient, caregiver
- Influenza Immunization received for current flu season
- Ambulation improvement
- Bed transferring improvement
- Bathing improvement
- Pain interfering with activity improvement
- Dyspnea improvement
- Acute care hospitalization
To offer consumers actionable tools, CMS offers two types of star ratings – The Quality of Patient Care Star Rating, based on the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) assessments and Medicare claims data, and Patient Survey Star Ratings, based on the Home Health Care Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HHCAHPS) survey data.
“Adding star ratings to Home Health Compare is another step forward in our continuing efforts to empower consumers by providing more information to help them make health care decisions, while also encouraging providers to strive for higher levels of quality,” states Patrick Conway, MD, Acting Principal Deputy Administrator for CMS and Deputy Administrator for Innovation and Quality.
