CMS Not Moving Forward With October Update of Hospital Compare

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it will not update its overall hospital quality star ratings on Hospital Compare in October. “CMS decided not to proceed with the October update to continue its examination of potential changes to the Star Rating methodology based on public feedback,” the agency said. The star ratings released last December will remain on the Hospital Compare website until the next update, CMS said. Flawed Methodology and Hospital Criticism When the ratings were posted in July 2016, they were heavily criticized by hospital groups and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) for “flawed methodology” and not accounting for socioeconomic factors in a hospital’s patient population. The AHA has continued to ask CMS to suspend the star ratings until the “methodology is improved” and consider scrapping the overall rating for ratings separated by topic areas like patient safety, patient experience and cardiac care. “The measures included in the ratings were never intended to create a single, representative score of hospital quality,” wrote Ashley Thompson, AHA’s senior vice president for public policy, in a September 25 letter to CMS. AHA has been a frequent critic of the star ratings program, saying it has “significant concerns about the conceptual underpinning” of the program and is concerned about the “reliability and accuracy” of the methodology used to determine the one-to-five star rankings. In J...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs