|
To: HHA Providers, CMS Staff
Expanded HHVBP Model: Final CY 2025 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) are Available in iQIES
Final CY 2025 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) are Available in iQIES
The Final CY 2025 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) for the expanded HHVBP Model have been published in the Internet Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (iQIES).
An HHA receives a CY 2025 APR if the HHA was Medicare-certified prior to January 1, 2023, had a prior year payment amount, and had sufficient data for at least five (5) quality measures to calculate a Total Performance Score (TPS) and Adjusted Payment Percentage (APP) (see Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1: CY 2025 APR quality measure performance scores time periods for each measure category
|
Measure Category
|
Time Period
|
Minimum Threshold
|
|
OASIS-based
|
Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024
|
20 home health quality episodes
|
|
Claims-based
|
Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024
|
20 home health stays
|
|
HHCAHPS Survey-based*
|
Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024
|
40 completed surveys
|
* Not included in the TPS calculation for HHAs in the smaller-volume cohort.
Note: APRs are only available to HHAs through iQIES.
Below is a list of the calendar years that are relevant to the “CY 2025 APR”, namely the baseline year, performance year, publication year, and payment year.
- The baseline year is CY 2022 and is used to calculate quality measure-specific achievement thresholds and benchmarks. CY 2022 and CY 2023 are used to calculate improvement thresholds depending on an HHA’s initial Medicare certification date and availability of sufficient data in the baseline years.
- CY 2024 is the performance year, and HHA performance in this calendar year is measured against 12 quality measures relative to performance of HHAs in each cohort.
- The publication year of the “CY 2025 APR” is CY 2025.
- CY 2026 is the payment year. That means that the HHA’s APP ranging from minus 5% to plus 5% is applied to Medicare Fee-for-Service (FFS) claims with through dates in CY 2026.
Were there any corrections applied to the CY 2025 APRs resulting from granted recalculation, reconsideration, or administrator review requests?
CMS granted a recalculation request pertaining to one (1) HHA that was incorrectly categorized as inactive and therefore did not receive a Preview CY 2025 APR. As a result, CMS added this HHA to the competing HHAs for subsequent Preliminary and Final CY 2025 APR production. This added HHA is part of the larger-volume cohort and received a Preliminary CY 2025 APR and a Final CY 2025 APR. To maintain budget neutrality across all competing HHAs within each cohort, any revisions, such as adding a competing HHA, require a rerunning of APR production. In this case, the addition of one (1) HHA to the larger-volume cohort resulted in a 0.001 higher APP for some HHAs in the larger-volume cohort. For the remaining HHAs in the larger-volume cohort, this addition did not have an impact on their APP. Note that the APP of smaller-volume HHAs were also not affected.
No reconsideration requests – and as a result no requests for Administrator review – were received after the Preliminary CY 2025 APRs were published. As such, the APP presented in the Final CY 2025 APR is the same as the APP reported in the Preliminary CY 2025 APR.
Accessing APRs
APRs are available via iQIES in the “HHA Provider Preview Reports” folder, by the CMS Certification number (CCN) assigned to the HHA. If your organization has more than one (1) CCN, then a report will be available for each CCN. Only iQIES users authorized to view an HHA’s reports can access expanded HHVBP Model reports. For assistance with downloading your HHA’s APR, please contact the iQIES Service Center at 1-800-339-9313, Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM-8:00 PM ET, or by email (iqies@cms.hhs.gov). To create a ticket online or track an existing ticket, please go to CCSQ Support Central.
- Log into iQIES at https://iqies.cms.gov/.
- Select the My Reports option from the Reports menu.
- From the My Reports page, select the HHA Provider Preview Reports folder. The folders and reports on the My Reports page are listed in alphabetical order. Thus, users may need to utilize the “page forward” functionality at the bottom of the webpage to advance to the page where the HHA Provider Preview Reports folder is located. Alternatively, users may change the default number of rows that display on the webpage from 10 to a larger number to view the larger list of folders. Note: Files in the HHA Provider Preview Reports folder are listed in descending order (i.e., in the order of the newest reports to the oldest).
- Select the HHVBP report file, and the contents of the file will display.
Instructions on how to access the APRs are also available on the Expanded HHVBP Model webpage, under “Model Reports.”
Contact Us
Please do not reply to this email – this is an unmonitored inbox. If you require assistance, use the following options:
- For program questions about the expanded HHVBP Model, contact the HHVBP Model Help Desk at HHVBPquestions@cms.hhs.gov.
- For support with registration for the Internet Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (iQIES), please contact our QIES/iQIES Service Center by phone at (800) 339-9313 or by email at iqies@cms.hhs.gov. You may also refer to the iQIES Onboarding Guide posted to QTSO for registration support: https://qtso.cms.gov/software/iqies/reference-manuals.
- To receive email updates about the expanded Model, please subscribe to the Expanded HHVBP Model listserv. Enter your email address in the contact form, then select “Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) Expanded Model” from the Innovations list.
- Please contact the Home Health Quality Reporting Program (HH QRP) Help Desk at homehealthqualityquestions@cms.hhs.gov for questions about the following: Home Health Quality, including Care Compare (excluding HHCAHPS), OASIS coding and OASIS documentation, quality reporting requirements & deadlines, data reported in quality reports, measure calculations, Quality of Patient Care Star Rating (excluding suppression requests), public reporting, risk adjustment, and Quality Assessment Only (QAO)/Pay for Reporting (P4P).
- Please contact the Home Health CAHPS Help Desk at hhcahps@rti.org for questions related to the HHCAHPS Survey or Patient Survey Star Ratings.
 |
Important Links:
Expanded HHVBP Model webpage | Expanded HHVBP Model YouTube playlist
|