Hospices get 1.8 percent payment increase for 2019
Hospices that fail to meet quality reporting requirements receive a 2 percent reduction to their payments.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a final rule Wednesday updating the 2019 Medicare payment rates and the wage index for hospices serving Medicare beneficiaries.
Hospices will see a 1.8 percent, or $340 million, increase in their payments for 2019. The 1.8 percent hospice payment update is based on a 2.9 percent inpatient hospital market basket update, reduced by a 0.8 percent multifactor productivity adjustment and reduced by a 0.3 percent adjustment required by law.
The payment system includes a statutory aggregate cap that limits the overall payments made to a hospice annually. The cap amount for 2019 will be $29,205.44, an 1.8 percent increase over the 2018 cap amount of $28,689.04.
The final rule also updates the reporting requirements in the hospice quality reporting program.
Hospices that fail to meet quality reporting requirements receive a 2 percent reduction to their payments.
Specifically, the final rule finalizes several procedural policies, including a review and correction timeframes for data submitted using the hospice item set, an extension of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, or CAHPS hospice survey participation requirements.
Also finalized are specific updates and improvements to hospice compare including the public display of the hospice item set-based hospice comprehensive assessment measure and hospice visits when death is imminent measure pair, reformatting of the public display of the current seven HIS quality measures, and inclusion of data as shown from the CMS public use files to help consumers make an informed decision in their selection of a hospice.
In this rule, CMS is finalizing a measure removal factor that takes into consideration whether the costs and burden associated with a measure outweigh the benefit of its continued use in the program. The goal is to move the program forward in the least costly and burdensome manner possible, while maintaining meaningful quality measures and continuing to incentivize improvement in the quality of care provided to patients, CMS said.
The final rule enables more efficient use of hospice compare data in the quality reporting program by no longer directly displaying the seven component measures from which a composite measure is calculated on hospice compare, CMS said. CMS would still provide the public the ability to view these component measures in a manner that avoids confusion on hospice compare. CMS plans to achieve this by reformatting the display of the component measures so that they are only viewable in an expandable/collapsible format under the composite measure itself, thus allowing users the opportunity to view the component measure scores that were used to calculate the main composite measure score.
The rule also recognizes that as of 2019, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 allows physician assistants to be recognized as attending physicians for Medicare hospice beneficiaries. This statutory change expands the definition of a hospice attending physician to include physician assistants, in addition to physicians and nurse practitioners.
Twitter: @SusanJMorse
Email the writer: susan.morse@himssmedia.com
