A report released September 7, 2023, from the Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that home health agencies failed to report on the OASIS assessment falls with major injury that resulted in a hospitalization for more than half of patients. Based on this, OIG concluded that the high rate of non-reporting impacted the accuracy of Care Compare information about incidence of these falls.

This element of OASIS reporting has been required since 2019 and CMS began publicly reporting the information in 2022. Reporting of these falls was lower in for-profit agencies than non-profit agencies. Additionally, OIG found that for many home health patients who fell and were hospitalized, no OASIS assessment was completed putting agencies out of compliance with regulatory requirements. OIG made four key recommendations, to which CMS concurred:

• Take steps to ensure the completeness and accuracy of the HHA reported OASIS data used to calculate the falls with major injury quality measure.
• Use data sources, in addition to OASIS assessments, to improve the accuracy of the quality measure related to falls with major injury.
• Ensure that HHAs submit required OASIS assessments when their patients are hospitalized.
• Explore whether improvements to the quality measure related to falls can also be used to improve the accuracy of other home health measures.