Public Comment Sought on Community-based Palliative Care Measures
WASHINGTON, D.C. (February 9, 2021)—In September 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded seven organizations new cooperative agreements to partner in developing, improving, updating or expanding quality measures for Medicare’s Quality Payment Program (QPP). Among these cooperative agreements—authorized under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA)—was a $5.5 million grant to the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) for development of two measures for community-based palliative care (an area widely recognized as having significant gaps relative to the availability of quality measures).
AAHPM has been working in partnership with the National Coalition for Hospice and Palliative Care and the RAND Corporation on this project, which includes the following two measures:
- How much patients feel heard and understood, and
- How much patients get the help they wanted for pain.
The two proposed measures fall under the category of “patient reported outcomes performance measures” or “PRO-PMs” which are a new type of measure for palliative care providers to evaluate the quality of care they deliver based upon patient reported experience.
The measures project (titled the Palliative Care Measures Project) has progressed and is currently requesting feedback through a public comment survey from patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other professionals on the importance of implementing the two new proposed patient-reported experience measures that assess the quality of care provided by palliative care teams working in doctor’s offices and clinics
Given the newness of PRO-PMs within palliative care, the focus of the public comment period will be on implementation (rather than measure specifications or data elements) to understand the feasibility of implementing the measures directly from clinicians, patients, and caregivers.
Following are the specific public comment goals:
- Increase awareness and educate the public about the two proposed measures
- Obtain feedback on the feasibility of the implementation of measures
- Engage providers, patients, and caregivers to ascertain the usefulness of these measures
- Obtain support for the measures for implementation in the CMS QPP Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and for endorsement by the national consensus-based endorsement entity (i.e., National Quality Forum) to encourage clinicians to adopt and utilize the measures in practice.
The public comment period opened on February 1 and will close on March 2. The National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC) is a member of the National Coalition for Hospice and Palliative Care.
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