CMS Awards $5.5M to Develop Palliative Care Quality Measures

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has awarded the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM), in partnership with the National Coalition for Hospice and Palliative Care and the RAND Corporation, a three-year grant of $5.5 million to develop quality measures for community-based palliative care, reports Home Health Care News . "Only a few of the quality measures currently available for reporting under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System are meaningful for palliative care clinicians who treat a broad population of seriously ill people, particularly in outpatient settings," says AAHPM's Joe Rotella. "The new measures under development will matter for palliative care recipients and the clinicians who are accountable for the quality of their care." The measures could entail major changes for how Medicare covers palliative care for beneficiaries under home healthcare. Medicare presently covers home visits for certain medical clinicians, but key members of the palliative care team, such as social workers and chaplains, are not covered. "Earlier this year, AAHPM and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care presented proposals to the Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC) for alternate payment models for providing palliative care in people's homes," Rotella notes. "Both models were recommended for demonstration, and AAHPM and C-TAC have provided additional recommendations to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. Any alternative payment model for serious illness tested by CMS would include accountability for quality. We expect that the quality measures to be developed here for MIPS would also be applicable to relevant alternative payment models."