October 4, 2023 Washington, DC — Statement from LeadingAge, the association of nonprofit providers of aging services, including hospice, on Congressional advocacy to improve hospice quality, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ design of the hospice Special Focus Program (SFP), created as a result of the 2020 passage of the HOSPICE Act.
“Nonprofit hospice providers have long been standard bearers for quality care in the sector, and our mission-driven members are committed to continuing that tradition,” said Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO, LeadingAge. “We support the recommendations of Reps Van Duyne (R-TX), Blumenauer (D-OR), and colleagues, and urge CMS to address concerns with the SFP.”
LeadingAge has also shared with CMS concerns on this topic, (see page 9 of our CMS-1780-P comments), which echoed the requests made by the Congresspeople to CMS in their Oct. 4 2023 letter:
- Make changes, in consultation with the technical expert panel, to address concerns with the current SFP algorithm
- Provide opportunity for stakeholder input on the changes prior to finalizing the SFP
- Provide all Medicare-certified hospices a preview of how they perform under the updated SFP prior to formally launching the program.
Added Mollie Gurian, LeadingAge vice president of home-based and HCBS policy, “It’s critically important that CMS get the SFP right. The agency is taking great steps on fraud and abuse. We want to make sure that they take that same time and attention to this quality improvement effort.
We, like the Congresspeople, support the intent of the program—to identify poor performing hospices and create opportunities for quality improvement—but are concerned that the program as designed will not achieve those aims. An effective SFP is critical to ensure beneficiaries have access to quality care.
We believe that SFP implementation must be developed with the proper algorithm to ensure the right programs are targeted and beneficiaries who refer to SFP-generated data are not misled as a result of inaccurate data.”
