CMS to Freeze Public Posting of SNF QRP Data

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a Tip Sheet outlining the posting of Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Quality Reporting Program (QRP) data. In the Tip Sheet, CMS clarifies that public reporting of QRP measures will be frozen from January through October of 2021. After the October 2020 update, the QRP publicly available data will not be updated until January 2022. This comes as a result of the temporary changes to SNF QRP data submission requirements. Due to the COVID-19 emergency, CMS excepted providers from submitting QRP data for the first two quarters of Calendar Year (CY) 2020 and made 2019 Q4 data submissions optional. Because a significant percentage of providers did report in 2019 Q4, CMS does have sufficient data to issue an October 2020 update.

Note that the information in this Tip Sheet describes public reporting of QRP measures; information on provider reporting requirements and the exceptions that expired on June 30, 2019 was provided in a previous Tip Sheet and is described here. The new Tip Sheet is available here.

CMS also noted that after the October 2020 refresh, it will not issue the customary provider preview reports until the data is unfrozen. The Agency is also aware that providers may experience warning errors when submitting discharge data after July 1, 2020 that may not have a matching Minimum Data Set (MDS) admission record if the admissions occurred in Q1 or Q2 of 2020. CMS will make adjustments on its end to accommodate any records with missing admissions, and mismatched sets of records will not be counted in SNF data calculations for Nursing Home Compare.

Contact: Darius Kirstein, dkirstein@leadingageny.org, 518-867-8841