CMS releases home health proposed rule

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services today released the proposed rule for the home health prospective payment system for calendar year 2017, which, after all policy changes, would reduce home health payments by 1.0% from 2016 payment levels. CMS proposes a 2.8% market-basket update and 0.5 percentage point cut for productivity, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act. It also would apply the second of three planned 0.97 percentage point cuts to account for estimated case mix growth from CYs 2012 through 2014 that the agency states was unrelated to increases in patient acuity. The rule also would implement the final year of the four-year phase-in of the rebasing of this payment system, as mandated by the ACA; modify the methodology for calculating outlier payments; add four new measures to the HH Quality Reporting Program reflecting Medicare spending per beneficiary, preventable hospital readmissions, discharges to community and medication reconciliation; and make several changes to the measures and scoring approach of the HH Value-Based Purchasing program, a mandatory payment model for all home health agencies in nine states. The rule will be published in the July 5 Federal Register with comments accepted through Aug. 26.