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Discharge to Community-Post Acute Care Measure for Home Health Agencies

CBE ID
3477
Endorsement Status
1.0 New or Maintenance
1.1 Measure Structure
Previous Endorsement Cycle
Is Under Review
No
Next Maintenance Cycle
Fall 2025
1.6 Measure Description

The Discharge to Community-Post Acute Care Measure for Home Health Agencies (DTC-PAC HHA) measure was developed to address the resource use and other measures domain of Discharge to the Community, a domain mandated by the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act of 2014 (IMPACT Act). The measure was developed using calendar year 2012-2013 data.

This Medicare claims-based outcome measure assesses successful discharge to community from an HHA, with successful discharge to community including no unplanned hospitalizations and no death in the 31 days following discharge. Specifically, this measure reports an HHA’s risk-standardized rate of Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) patients who are discharged to the community following an HHA stay, and do not have an unplanned admission to an acute care hospital or long-term care hospital (LTCH) in the 31 days following discharge to community, and who remain alive during the 31 days following discharge to community. The measure is based on Medicare FFS claims data and is calculated using two consecutive years of data. This measure submission is based on CY 2015-2016 data; i.e., HHA discharges from January 1, 2015 through December 31, 2016.

The measure was adopted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for the HH Quality Reporting Program finalized in the Calendar Year (CY) 2017 HH Quality Reporting Program (QRP) Final Rule and implementation began October 2016. Confidential feedback reports on measure performance were distributed to HH providers in early 2018. The measure will be publicly reported on the Home Health Compare website (https://www.medicare.gov/homehealthcompare) in January 2019 using CY 2016-2017 data. Four claims-based discharge to community measures were developed for IRF, LTCH, skilled nursing facility, and home health agency settings, respectively to meet the mandate of the IMPACT Act. These measures were conceptualized uniformly across the four settings, in terms of the definition of the discharge to community outcome, the approach to risk adjustment, and the measure calculation.

Measure Specs
General Information
1.7 Measure Type
1.3 Electronic Clinical Quality Measure (eCQM)
1.8 Level of Analysis
1.20 Types of Data Sources