The Federal Financial Forum

From: McKnight’s

Emily Mongan, Staff Writer

In a move sure to surprise many providers, the Government Accountability Office will investigate the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Five-Star Quality Rating System, according to a published report.

Notice of the investigation appeared in a Bloomberg BNA article, following a request first reported by McKnight’s from Sens. Robert Casey (D-PA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR). The lawmakers want the government watchdog to investigate the system, which is part of the CMS’ Nursing Home Compare web tool.

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CMS has contracted with Yale-New Haven Health Services Corporation/CORE and Lantana Consulting Group to further develop Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings.

Source: CMS’s Clinical Quality Measures a Top Healthcare Priority – RevCycleIntelligence

CMS has awarded an $800 million contract to “assist CMS in developing, testing, refining, revising, maintaining, implementing, and publically reporting quality healthcare-specific measures.” The duties assigned to the contractors include the responsibility for collecting and evaluating public comments on the agency’s Hospital Compare star ratings project.

Because CMS never receives the comments, only summaries prepared by the contractors, the comments are not covered by the Federal Records Act. CMS is preventing public inspection of the public comments since the comments are not being made public and are not subject to FOIA. The result is that public oversight of the contractors and CMS’s development of the star ratings is being quashed.

From: AHA News

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has extended to Sept. 14 the deadline for comments on its proposed star rating system for overall hospital-level quality. The original deadline was today. CMS recently added star ratings for consumer assessment survey measures to Hospital Compare, and plans to add overall star ratings to the website next year. A dry run test of the proposed methodology concludes today. Comments on the proposed methodology should be submitted to cmsstarratings@yale.edu. For more information, visit www.qualitynet.org.

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From: Dialysis Patient Citizens 

The Medicare five-star rating system, maintained by the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services’ (CMS), has recently come under scrutiny by the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness (CRE). In a letter from last month, CRE officials report that multiple entities have contacted them about the system possibly violating federal regulations.