2022 is the pre-implementation year for Value Based Purchasing and 2023 is the first performance year for Home Health VBP. It is more critical than ever to understand how your agency is performing on important clinical quality metrics. In this webinar featuring commentary from Joseph Brence, Head of Clinical Strategy at MedBridge, and Andy Guarnera, Director of Product Management, Data Analytics at Homecare Homebase, we discuss important tools to prepare your agency for these upcoming changes. We also cover how to monitor and improve your home health clinical performance using HCHB Analytics. Watch the webinar and read on to learn more about:
- Home health VBP basics & scoring
- HCHB Analytics dashboards
- Performance improvement strategies for VBP
What is VBP?
Value Based Purchasing is a program CMS is implementing to focus home health reimbursement around patient outcomes, functional status, utilization, and patient experience. The program was initially piloted in nine states and has now been expanded nationwide. 2023 will be the first year that CMS will use VBP quality measures to evaluate agencies.
VBP measures
Eight quality measures will be used to create a score that determines revenue adjustments for each home health agency. The Home Health VBP program looks at these metrics to determine an agency’s quality improvement over time and compare the agency’s quality of care to other home health providers. To make the comparison between agencies, CMS has created two nationwide cohorts. Most companies fall into the large cohort. The small cohort will be made up of organizations that see fewer than 60 patients annually. Scores will impact agencies in the 2025 payment year.
Home health VBP scoring
There are four fundamental values that make up a VBP score:
- Performance
- Improvement threshold
- Achievement threshold
- Benchmark
Each of these values culminate in an achievement score and improvement score as shown in the model below. The improvement score tells you how you did this year compared to the past, and the achievement score tells you how you did this year compared to how everyone else did in the past. CMS will use your improvement and achievement scores to create values for each quality measure. Below is a diagram that illustrates how these scores are used in the calculation. Watch the webinar recording for more examples and a detailed breakdown on scoring calculations.
Monitor home health VBP data with HCHB Analytics
HCHB Analytics is a business intelligence platform that gives you insights into your Homecare Homebase data. There are many stock dashboards that include a variety of different metrics and can be viewed by anyone in your organization with access to HCHB. Additionally, HCHB Analytics also allows you to configure and customize your own dashboards.
To view a live demo of the HCHB Analytics Home Health VBP dashboard, watch the webinar here. The dashboard was released in 2022 as a pre-implementation resource to give users a view into their current performance before the start of Home Health VBP. It is as much an educational dashboard as it is an operational dashboard.
How to use the dashboard
- Learn and understand about how your home health VBP scores are calculated
- Focus your attention on higher opportunity measures and branches
- Track your progress over time
- Start planning for how your data is going to change and impact future revenue
There has been a collective shift toward value-based care across the healthcare landscape, and it will continue to be a focus for CMS. Now is the time to look at your VBP data and develop performance improvement strategies against it.
Homecare Homebase has partnered with MedBridge to help customers with education and performance improvement efforts. MedBridge’s Home Health VBP overview series provides your clinicians and agency administration with an educational foundation to ensure that you are leveraging the tools to be successful in this new era. Additionally, they encourage not only sending awareness notifications to your clinicians and leaders to help prepare for the change.
It’s also important to consider your performance improvement, education, and QAPI initiatives. There are certain questions on the OASIS that are going to impact your score, and MedBridge has broken all of those questions down into bite-sized pieces of education.
Providing a successful performance improvement strategy
There must be a significant amount of change management messaging shared with those who are supervising clinicians. In fact, both levels of employees need some type of education. MedBridge recently completed a case study with a home health agency that was able to improve their OASIS accuracy by upwards of 28%.
As a key takeaway from this webinar, Homecare Homebase encourages you to look beyond the data to find opportunities for change and improvement. For more information about OASIS education with MedBridge, visit their website here. To learn more about HCHB Analytics, visit our Solutions page.
