Star Rating Coming for Hospices and Other CAHPS Updates

From the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized the addition of a CAHPS hospice survey star rating for the hospice quality reporting program in the FY2022 hospice final rule, and the star rating will be publicly reported on Care Compare in August 2022. CMS is calling this star rating the “Family Caregiver Survey Rating Summary star” and hospices with 75 or more completed surveys over the reporting period will have their star rating publicly reported. The rating is the weighted average of the star ratings for each of the eight CAHPS hospice survey quality measures for a hospice.

Hospices will have the opportunity to see their CAHPS Hospice Survey Star Ratings in their official CMS Preview Report during the provider preview period prior to each update of Care Compare. Hospices will first see their Star Ratings in their Preview Reports during the preview periods for the February 2022 and May 2022 updates of Care Compare, which will be a “dry run.” CAHPS Hospice Survey Star Ratings will not be publicly reported in February or May 2022. The reporting period for the dry run is October 1, 2018 – December 31, 2019; July 1, 2020 – March 31, 2021.

The Star Rating for hospices is similar to Star Ratings in other provider types in that it consists of five stars with a range of the lowest score of one star to the highest score of five stars. According to the state and national distribution data posted on the CAHPS hospice survey website for the “dry run” period, the majority of hospices received a rating of 3-stars or 4-stars with 35% and 39% respectively.

CMS will provide more information on the star rating in its Home Health, Hospice & DME Open Door Forum (ODF) on November 10 (see previous NAHC Report coverage here). Until then, some information has been posted to the CMS CAHPS Hospice Survey website including:

• The prepared slide deck for the November 10 ODF that provides an overview of the star rating.
• The star rating technical notes.
• Star rating Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• State and national distributions of the star rating

NAHC is reviewing these documents and will provide a summary over the coming days.

In CAHPS Hospice Survey related updates, CMS recently posted the survey national percentiles for the measures for the Quarter 4 2018 – Quarter 4 2019; Quarter 3 2020 – Quarter 1 2021 public reporting period.  The average measure scores for each state for this same period are available as is the case-mix adjustment methods for CAHPS hospice survey measures document and the most recent CAHPS hospice survey response rate.