In 2001, the Quality Initiative was implemented in HHS to ensure the quality of health care for all Americans through accountability and public disclosure. The goals of the initiative are to empower consumers with quality-of-care information so they can make more informed decisions about their health care and to stimulate and support providers and clinicians to improve the quality of health care. The Quality Initiative was launched nationally in November 2002 for nursing homes and was expanded to home health agencies (the Home Health Quality Initiative) in 2003. A major gap in the information currently available regarding the quality of home health care is the lack of information from the patient perspective.
As part of the DHHS Transparency Initiative on Quality Reporting, CMS plans to implement a process to measure and publicly report patients' experiences with home health care they receive from Medicare-certified home health agencies through the data collection effort described in this request: the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS?) Home Health Care Survey. The Home Health Care CAHPS Survey, which was developed and tested by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and is part of the family of CAHPS surveys, is a standardized survey for home health patients to assess their home health care providers and the quality of the home health care they receive. Prior to the Home Health Care CAHPS survey, there was no national standard for collecting data about home health care patients' experience with their home health care. This is a revision to the original PRA package which covered the voluntary implementation of the survey among Medicare-certified agencies and a randomized mode experiment to test the impact of different modes of data collection on survey responses.
US Code:
42 USC 301
Name of Law: US Public Health Service Act
The HHAs have some burden in the HHCAHPS that was NOT included in the last PRA package. We require small home health agencies that serve 59 or fewer patients in an annual period to complete an HHCAHPS Participation Exemption Request Form annually, for every CY Annual Payment Update period. Currently, we have posted the HHCAHPS Participation Exemption Request Form for the CY 2015 Annual Payment Update. If home health agencies have served 59 or fewer HHCAHPS eligible patients in the period of April 2012 through March 2013, then they are required to complete the HHCAHPS Participation Exemption Request Form for CY 2015 if they want to be exempt from HHCAHPS participation from April 2013 through March 2014. Although we have explained the usage of the participation exemption form for the past five years in federal regulation we have not declared the burden of completing the form to small home health agencies. We are additionally attaching the current version of the HHCAHPS in all languages that it is approved for use. In the prior OMB package, we only included the English version of the HHCAHPS survey.
The number of individuals completing the survey has been adjusted from 2,706,000 to 2,967,000. The program chnage consists of an additional 1,160 hours and $21,112 for the 2,000 HHAs completing the Participation Exemption form. Finally, while reported in Supporting Statement part A, $39,560,000 has been removed from the burden table since those costs are labor-specific.
On behalf of this Federal agency, I certify that the collection of information encompassed by this request complies with 5 CFR 1320.9 and the related provisions of 5 CFR 1320.8(b)(3).
The following is a summary of the topics, regarding the proposed collection of information, that the certification covers:
(i) Why the information is being collected;
(ii) Use of information;
(iii) Burden estimate;
(iv) Nature of response (voluntary, required for a benefit, or mandatory);
(v) Nature and extent of confidentiality; and
(vi) Need to display currently valid OMB control number;
If you are unable to certify compliance with any of these provisions, identify the item by leaving the box unchecked and explain the reason in the Supporting Statement.
Form CMS-10275 HHCAHPS Participation Exemption Request Form
HomeHealthCAHPS_OMB_PartB revised 6-10-13.doc
HHCAHPS_LeadLetter2_English.pdf
HHCAHPS Participation Exemption Request Form