On February 28, 2019, CMS issued a 48-page request for public comment (the Request) on several potential updates to and future considerations for the methodology used in the Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating. As explained in the Request, the “goal of the Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating is to improve the usability, accessibility, and interpretability of CMS’s hospital quality website, Hospital Compare, for patients and consumers. Hospital Compare is a website that includes information on over 100 quality measures from more than 4,000 hospitals.” In the Request, CMS seeks feedback on several updates to the Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating methodology that could be implemented in the near term, as well as additional topics for future exploration. Public comments are due by the close of business on March 29, 2019.
The potential updates and future considerations are intended to address select stakeholder concerns about sensitivity of the Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating methodology to changes in the measures and underlying data. Specific areas for feedback include, for example: (i) the value of calculating the Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating based on peer groups of hospitals (grouping together, for example, teaching hospitals and small/rural/Critical Access Hospitals) and whether there should be two star ratings generated — one overall rating based on all hospitals and a separate rating based on peer groupings — or just one star rating based on peer grouping; (ii) the benefits and drawbacks of refreshing the Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating only once a year, rather than twice a year; (iii) the advantages and disadvantages of an explicit approach to calculating overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings, instead of using a statistical model to determine a hospital’s measure group score; and (iv) the way CMS groups individual measure specifications and defines measure groups, as individual measure specifications are updated or measures are added or removed.
A full summary of the topics for public comment and the instructions for providing feedback are in the Request, available here.
