Continue to work on your facility’s CMS-2744 Annual Facility Survey for 2018. All instructions and guides are located on the Network’s CROWNWeb Resources page.
5-star and You
Dialysis Facility Compare is a Medicare-run website that provides facility ratings to patients. There are two ratings: quality of patient care and the ICH CAHPS ratings. These ratings are based on comparative national averages, meaning it ranks your facility out of the nation, so three stars represents the national average. Quality of patient care star ratings are based on your clinic’s performance in: transfusions, bloodstream infections, adequacy and nutrition, vascular access, MBD, and hospitalizations/mortality.Need a ready reference for logging in to check your scores?
Empty Chairs: Helping Patients with Hospitalizations
Going into the hospital is tough enough without dealing with the hassles after discharge, but it can be endlessly tiresome for patients and families to navigate the system. It’s frustrating for you too if your clinic does not have easy access to patient records post hospitalization, such as changes in their home meds list.
Provide your patients and their families with this Discharge Planning Checklist from Medicare to help ease the transition:
Depending on the details of each case, the ESRD Network may assume one or more of the following roles in addressing a grievance filed by an ESRD patient, an individual representing an ESRD patient, or another party: Facilitator, Expert Investigator, Educator, Quality Improvement Specialist, Advocate, and Referral Source. The Network may also take on other roles as required based on an understanding that our primary goal is to resolve the case as successfully as possible for the grievant. Further information for providers is available here:
Patient compliance can take a major turnaround when they are given the opportunity to be responsible for their own treatments. Consider asking, “Did you know you can do dialysis while you sleep?”
CMS will base your reimbursement for 2020 on data collected in 2018. The Preview Period to look at your data comes up once a year in late summer. Be prepared and know what you will be measured on: Vascular Access Type (VAT) Measure Topic – Catheter > 90 Days Clinical Measure. We are all familiar with this one… how many patients have had their CVC longer than 90 days? Excluded patients include those younger than 18 years, not on ICHD or AKI. Baseline data will use October through December 2017 for measuring performance.
