CMS this month will detail for hospices the progress it’s making on its planned Hospice Evaluation and Assessment Reporting Tool (HEART).
 
The federal Medicare agency announced plans for a special open door forum 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST Sept. 26 to discuss the tool. It will be the first in a series of forums CMS has planned about HEART.
 
For several years, CMS has worked on creating this new data collection mechanism for hospice. HEART is expected to be a hospice patient assessment tool that accomplishes two main things — providing quality data necessary for quality reporting requirements and the current function of the HIS, and providing more clinical data to “inform future payment refinements.”
 
During the upcoming forum, hospices and other interested parties will be able to ask questions on the tool’s development. It is the first in a series of regular special open door forums CMS has planned on HEART.
 
Learn more about the forum at https://go.cms.gov/2oIMx2d.
 
In July, CMS had announced that to address concerns raised during pilot testing, CMS had decided to delay further testing phases. But CMS has worked diligently to retool HEART.
 
CMS recently added a HEART webpage to the quality reporting website at https://go.cms.gov/2KMOl7X.
 
Also, a technical expert panel met last year about HEART. Read the panel’s report at https://go.cms.gov/2NKiYZN.