CMS will make interim Quality Assessment Only (QAO) data available through CASPER reports that show agency performance against the QAO metric.
 
Recall that CMS finalized in the 2016 PPS final rule its pay-for-reporting performance requirement of submitting 70% of its quality assessments to CMS through ASAP on or after July 1, 2015, and before June 30, 2016, with appropriate start-of-care (SOC) dates or be subject to a 2% reduction to their market basket update for 2017.
 
CMS will ramp up its required percentage of submitted quality assessments to 80% for the reporting period from July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017, and 90% for the July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018, reporting period and thereafter, it says in the final rule.
 
CMS says in a Jan. 12 post that the interim QAO data is to be used for informational purposes only and will not be used to determine pay-for-reporting compliance. The first such report is scheduled to be released by the end of January and will be based on OASIS assessments completed from Oct. 1, 2014, to Sept. 30, 2015, CMS says.
 
The federal Medicare agency intends to release these informational reports quarterly going forward.
 
Related link: Find the brief on the QAO reports at http://tinyurl.com/h29uaq7.