CMS Makes Changes to Antipsychotic Measures on CASPER Reports

As stated by CMS earlier this year, the long-stay antipsychotic measure reported on Nursing Home Compare (NHC) will replace the surveyor antipsychotic measure that has appeared on the CASPER reports.  Since July 2012, CMS had made three Quality Measures available to track the use of antipsychotics in nursing homes, including two measures (one long-stay and one short-stay) on NHC and one long-stay surveyor measure on the CASPER reports.  As of last week, the surveyor measure has been removed from the CASPER reports. It is important to note that the difference between the NHC and CASPER measures primarily pertain to differences in the resident exclusion criteria.  The NHC measures use only three resident conditions as exclusions for triggering the measure: Schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome and Huntington's disease as opposed to seven different conditions that were applied to the surveyor measures.  Having fewer exclusions in the NHC measures allows more residents to trigger.  The implication of this is that you will likely see an increase in your rates reported by the CASPER system.

Read the full definitions of the long-stay and short-stay antipsychotic QMs in the newly released version 7.0 QM User's Manual.

Contact: Kathy Pellatt, kpellatt@leadingageny.org, 518-867-8383