Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

Hip With the Times - July 2017 - Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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When Quality Reporting Becomes Burdensome Patient satisfaction surveys could be more trouble than they're worth. T he OAS CAHPS CMS survey is a bureaucrat's delight. Everything about it is overdone and overbearing, from its clunky 11-word name to its 37 questions — many of which are highly intrusive of your patients' personal information — to its threat to withhold 2% of your Medicare reimbursement as penalty for not complying with a voluntary quality reporting program that becomes mandatory for all ambulatory surgery centers and hospital outpatient departments on Jan. 1 — unless, of course, Medicare finds reason to push back the start of the survey known as the ... deep breath ... Outpatient and Ambulatory Surgery Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems by 100 or so days. Just what you need, says healthcare attorney Mark F. Weiss, "forced compliance with yet another governmental program imposed on already overworked ASC administrators and staff." "Are Your Ready for OAS CAHPS?" on page 60 answers many of the questions you might have about the satisfaction survey that asks your patients about nausea, bleeding, pain, infection and discharge instruc- tions. Survey response options are Yes, Definitely; Yes, Somewhat; and No. But in typical bureaucratic fashion, how patients answer doesn't really matter. OAS CAHPS is pay for reporting, not pay for perform- ance. What matters to CMS is whether you meet the data submission requirements, not the score. Yes, your score will be publicly reported and one day CMS might apply its hospital star rating system to sur- gery centers based on quality reporting, but all CMS cares about is that, starting in 2018, you complete 300 surveys in a year. "The entire quality reporting system is still only pay for play, not (yet, anyhow) pay for performance. Sort of like pass/fail," says David 6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U L Y 2 0 1 7 Editor's Page Dan O'Connor

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