CMS declines to endorse the recently validated Missouri Alliance for Home Care (MAHC) tool in its October 2012 OASIS Q&As, published yesterday.

"CMS does not approve or disapprove individual tools," according to Answer 7 of the Q&As.

Question 7 asked CMS to comment on whether agencies will be allowed to use the tool to answer "yes" on M1910 (Falls risk assessment), and whether a threshold of 4 or 6 "yes" responses on the tool itself should be used to indicate falls risk.

The federal Medicare agency did not directly respond to the second question, saying only that agencies should be guided by the standardized response scale of whichever validated tool they choose to use.

The MAHC tool had recently been validated through a study published in a peer-reviewed journal, making it the first-ever multi-factorial and validated falls risk assessment tool.