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Spend a few minutes watching this PRCtv episode and learn all you need to know about Home Health Care CAHPS, including eligibility requirements, timelines, administration protocols, what affects scores, and other important information. |
Background Summary The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) developed the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Home Health Care Survey - Home Health CAHPS - to measure the experiences of people receiving home health care from Medicare-certified home health agencies. |
National Implementation On October 30, 2009, CMS issued a final rule to update the Medicare Home Health Prospective Payment (HH PPS) rates for CY2010. The Home Health Care CAHPS survey will now be tied to the CY2012 (October 2011 - September 2012) market basket payment update, which is one year later than was originally proposed. All home health agencies seeking full reimbursement will need to collect Home Health Care CAHPS survey data beginning October 2010 as one full year of survey data must be collected by September 2011 for full reimbursement. Those that do not comply will be subject to a 2% reduction in their market basket payment update. Home health agencies will be required to participate in a dry run of the survey for at least one month of the July - September 2010 quarter. Agencies that have fewer than 60 eligible, unduplicated patients would be exempt from data collection from July 2010 through June 2011. CMS anticipates first reporting Home Health Care CAHPS survey data in early 2011 on the Home Health Compare website. The survey data will be updated quarterly and HHAs will be provided a preview of the data each quarter before it is publicly reported. A major factor in this decision to postpone the mandatory surveying period by one year is the implementation fo the new versio of OASIS, OASIS-C, beginning January 1, 2010. By delaying the madatory implementation of the Home Health Care CAHPS survey, CMS hopes it will allow agencies enough time to fully implement OASIS-C. The entire document of the final rule can be found at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/center/hha.asp. |
Survey Questions The Home Health CAHPS survey consists of a core survey and optional supplemental questions. Additionaly, home health agencies may add their own questions to the survey instrument so long as the questions are placed after the core Home Health CAHPS survey questions. It is recommended that any questions added to the instrument be placed after the core questions and immediately before the demographic questions in the "About You" section of the questionnaire. |
Survey Completion Targets CMS has placed a target of 300 completed surveys per year for each participating home health agency. Agencies that are not able to obtain 300 completed surveys due to their small size will be required to survey a census of their patients. CMS is aware that there is a wide variation in the size of Medicare-certified HHAs and is considering an exemption for agencies with very small volume. If this becomes finalized we will post it on this site. Survey sampling for the National Implementation will be conducted at the CMS Certification Number (CCN) level. Some agencies have multiple locations sharing the same CCN. In this case, a sample of patients across all locations with the same CCN will be selected so the results will represent all agencies that have the same CCN. However, if two or more agencies do not have the same CCN, they cannot pool their patients and conduct one survey; a separate survey must be conducted for each of these agencies. |
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