CMS is planning to combine and standardize eight separate Compare websites for Nursing Home, Hospital, Home Health, Dialysis Facility, Long-Term Care Hospital, Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility, Physician and Hospice into one point of entry.
“The new ‘Medicare Care Compare’ on Medicare.gov will offer Medicare beneficiaries and their caregivers and other users a consistent look and feel, providing a streamlined experience to meet their individual needs in accessing information about health care providers and care settings,” Verma wrote.
“In the new, unified experience, patients will be able to easily find the information that is most important to help make healthcare decisions, like getting quality data by the type of health care provider,” she added.
Key thoughts:
- Helps meet the needs of the new COPs for discharge planners to obtain an easier way to view post-acute providers.
- Consistent with President’s Trump Executive Order to improve Medicare for our nation’s seniors. One entry point makes this information available to the public to drive improvements to health care quality.
- Improves the online experience for beneficiaries and their caregivers to access healthcare information.
- A step in preparing for the IMPACT Act.
CMS says they are striving to anticipate the needs of Medicare beneficiaries, patients and stakeholders as they create these new comparison tools. In the coming weeks, they will be working with various stakeholders, including beneficiaries, patients and their advocates, health care groups, health care providers, researchers and the larger clinical community, to preview new features and gather feedback before the tools are completed and publicly launched. CMS will continue to make improvements leading up to and following the launch as part of our iterative improvement process and are committed to ensuring beneficiaries and other users have access to the accurate and useful comparison information they rely on. This will launch later this year.
Lisa Remington is president and publisher of the Remington Report magazine and President of Remington’s Home Care Leadership Think Tank. She has worked with more than 10,000 organizations in both a consultancy role and an educator. Lisa monitors the complex key trends and forces of change to develop a correct strategic approach to de-risk decision-making and create sustainable futures across the healthcare continuum.
