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CMS Grants Exceptions to Certain Quality Reporting Requirements for Counties Affected by California Wildfires

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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has granted exceptions under certain Medicare quality reporting, value-based purchasing and payment programs to providers located in Butte, Los Angeles and Ventura counties, which have all been designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as major disaster areas (DR-4407) due to the impact of the California wildfires.

Providers in those counties will be granted an exception and are not required to submit a request. 

A summary of the exceptions is listed below. More detailed information is included in a CMS memo.

Post-Acute Care Providers

  • All quality reporting program (QRP) reporting requirements, including the reporting of data on measures and any other data requested by CMS for the post-acute care QRPs

Inpatient Hospitals

  • Reporting requirements under the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey (HCAHPS)
  • Influenza Vaccination Coverage Among Healthcare Personnel measure
  • All Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program chart-abstracted measures, including clinical population and sampling data and National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) Healthcare-Associated Infection (HAI) measures
  • Clinical Data Abstraction Center (CDAC) records for chart-abstracted measures and HAI validation templates

Outpatient Hospitals

  • Submission deadline for all Hospital Outpatient QRP chart-abstracted measures
  • CDAC records for chart-abstracted measures

Ambulatory Surgical Centers

  • Data collection and submission requirements for all measures during the annual submission period for 2018 for the Ambulatory Surgical Center QRP

MIPS-Eligible Clinicians

  • MIPS-eligible clinicians will be automatically identified, and no action is required.
  • MIPS-eligible clinicians who are subject to the Alternative Payment Model scoring standard are not covered by the automatic extreme and uncontrollable circumstance policy, but may apply for an exception in the Promoting Interoperability performance category.

PPS-Exempt Cancer Hospitals

  • Chart-abstracted data and NHSN HAI data
  • HCAHPS reporting requirements
  • Influenza Vaccination Coverage Among Healthcare Personnel measure