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Action Needed:
Contact your congressional representative and ask them to cosponsor The Resetting the IMPACT Act (TRIA) of 2021, H.R. 2455. To find your representative’s contact information, visit www.house.gov/representatives/find.
To cosponsor the bill your representative should contact the sponsors’ offices. In Rep. Terri Sewell’s (D-AL) office, they should email Earl Flood (Earl.Flood@mail.house.gov); in Rep. Vern Buchanan’s (R-FL) office, they should email Don Green (Don.Green@mail.house.gov).
To assist with key messaging about the Act, CHA’s letter to Congress may be used as a template and personalized with details about your hospital and community.
Timing:
Contact your representative within the next month.
Background:
TRIA seeks to update the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act of 2014 by requiring the use of more recent, relevant data. CHA supports these updates because the collection of timely and accurate data is critical to informing the development of future payment policy that will support timely access to medically necessary post-acute medical and rehabilitative care.
The IMPACT Act requires the development and implementation of standardized patient assessment and quality reporting measures in the four major post-acute care settings — long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, skilled-nursing facilities, and home health agencies — to be used for quality, payment, discharge planning, and other purposes. It also requires that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission use data collected from those settings to research and model a unified post-acute care prospective payment system.
Post-acute care providers at all levels have, in recent years, experienced comprehensive changes in payment systems and setting-specific regulations. Additionally, the current public health emergency has significantly impacted many aspects of provider operations. As a result, data collected before the comprehensive changes and during the pandemic do not reflect the current configuration of PAC services and patient characteristics.
TRIA would require the exclusion of data collected prior to the recent post-acute care payment systems’ reforms, as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic. More information is available in a Dear Colleague Letter.