With OASIS-E set for Jan. 1 of 2023, home health providers need to begin preparing now, if they haven’t already.
After delays related to the public health emergency, OASIS-E is finally being implemented next year in order to line up with the start of the nationwide expansion of the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) Model.
For providers, payment and outcomes are directly impacted by OASIS data collection. It’s important that the data accurately reflects the status of the patient.
The OASIS-E update is arguably one of the biggest industry changes in recent years, J’non Griffin, principal of the coding and OASIS department at SimiTree Healthcare Consulting, told Home Health Care News.
“It will have a lot of new aspects, like social determinants of health,” she said. “It will have some increased behavioral assessments … that the skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) are already providing. It will also help facilitate one of the value-based purchasing items, which is the transfer of health information between post-acute providers, among other things.”
Expanded questions on pain and infusion are some of the other OASIS-E changes.
“Of course, it will be a learning process, especially in the beginning,” Griffin said. “Just doing things like the mental health assessment will take some education on the clinician’s part because usually, they don’t do those.”
For now, only a draft version of OASIS-E is available. But providers should expect the finalized version by the end of the first quarter of 2022.
Providers can look to their SNF counterparts for an idea of what’s to come, though they should still be on the lookout for potential changes.
“We pretty much know [what OASIS-E will look like] because these items are already being done in SNFs,” Griffin said. “But we also know they could tweak something at the last minute and decide not to put something in.”
In the year leading up to OASIS-E, providers should lean into preparation and education, according to Griffin.
“I think ongoing OASIS education is an important part of any agency’s operations,” she said. “We now not only have payment that’s really driven off of the functional items, but going into value-based purchasing in 2023, they’re really going to have to understand OASIS and how it plays an impact at start, at resumption and at discharge.”
As of now, about 40% of agencies don’t have a plan for OASIS-E education, according to recent survey data from Kornetti & Krafft Health Care Solutions.
On the flip side, 15% of agencies are planning to begin OASIS-E education sometime in 2022. About 55% are planning on training with a hybrid online and in-person method, according to the survey.
No matter what training strategy an agency chooses to go with, Griffin stressed the importance of not waiting until the last minute to implement OASIS-E education.
“There’s a lot of education that’s going to have to happen on the clinician level between OASIS- E and [HHVBP] before January comes around,” she said. “They need to understand how the models work and what kind of information they’re trying to collect from both. I think a plan needs to be made.”
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