Ohio KePRO today announced the launch of the Home Health Quality Initiative (HHQI) in Ohio to provide consumers with access to new, objective quality information about home health agencies in the state. The Initiative is a national effort by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to improve the quality of care given to millions of Americans who use home health care services across the country.
Currently over 100,000 elderly and disabled Ohioans receive care from the state's 345 Medicare-certified home health agencies annually. Ohio KePRO, an independent quality improvement organization (QIO) under contract with CMS, will work together with local home health agencies to improve the quality of care provided and to help consumers better use the quality performance data.
Over the past three years, a pilot group of QIOs successfully implemented a quality improvement program with home health agencies in their state. This program, called the Outcomes Based Quality Improvement (OBQI) System, uses OBQI reports generated from the CMS national repository of data items collected from home health agency Outcomes and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) data.
The Home Health Quality Initiative is part of an ongoing HHS Quality Initiative that also focuses on improving the quality of care in nursing homes and hospitals. The data released today involve 11 quality measures chosen from among 41 Outcomes and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) measures that have been used by home health agencies since 1999. They include four measures related to improvement in getting around, four measures related to improvement in meeting basic daily needs, two measures related to medical emergencies, and one measure related to mental health improvement.
On November 4, 2003, CMS will publish advertisements in newspapers around the country that will include some of the quality data. The complete quality data, along with other consumer information on home health agencies in Ohio, are available at Home Health Compare located on Medicare's consumer Web site, www.medicare.gov, and through Medicare's 24-hour help line at 1-800 MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227).
For more information on this news release, visit the Ohio KePRO website at http://www.ohiokepro.com/media/NationalRelease.doc.