CMS (Medicare) Home Health Pay for Performance demonstration


The Home Health Pay for Performance demonstration will offer incentive payments to a sample of Medicare home health agencies for maintaining high levels of quality care, or making significant improvement s in the quality of their services. HHP4P will be conducted in Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, California between Jan. 08 and Dec. 09.

An incentive pool will be generated out of savings accrued from the reduction in the use of more costly Medicare services. The pool will be shared with home health agencies that produced the highest level of patient care or produced the greatest improvement in patient care as measured by seven OASIS measures.

• Incidence of Acute Care Hospitalization
• Incidence of Any Emergent Care
• Improvement in Bathing
• Improvement in Ambulation / Locomotion
• Improvement in Transferring
• Improvement in Management of Oral Medications
• Improvement in Status of Surgical Wounds

Seventy-five percent of the incentive pool will be shared with those agencies in the top 20% of the highest level of patient care. Twenty-five percent of the incentive pool will be shared with the top 20% of those making the biggest improvements in patient care. If there are no savings, there will be no incentives.

CMS