The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) yesterday announced plans for a home health pay-for-performance demonstration. The agency will begin soliciting home health agencies (HHAs) for the project this fall, with the actual demonstration performance period to begin Jan. 1, 2008. The demonstration will operate for two years in seven states that provide a nationally representative sample of both HHAs and Medicare beneficiaries who utilize home health services: Alabama, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Tennessee.
Under the demonstration, HHAs will be eligible to receive incentive payments if their quality improvement efforts result in the highest performance levels or significant improvements in patient outcomes.
Seven quality measures from the existing outcome-based quality improvement set will be used to evaluate HHA performance: incidence of acute care hospitalization and of any emergent care, and improvements in bathing, ambulation/locomotion, transferring, status of surgical wounds, and management of oral medications.
