Dive Brief:
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CMS has announced additions to its Dialysis Facility Compare (DFC) website on Medicare.gov, which shares data on Medicare-certified dialysis facilities across the U.S, in response to patient and caregiver feedback on what information is important to them when choosing a dialysis facility.
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The DFC website will now include data from CMS' In-Center Hemodialysis Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (ICH-CAHPS) Survey on how patients rate their experiences at facilities, including treatment from staff and facility cleanliness.
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Two new quality measures are also being added to DFC.
Dive Insight:
The additions to DFC come as part of CMS' general push toward greater transparency and consumer-friendly data sharing, which it also offers through its other Compare websites including Home Health Compare, Hospital Compare, Nursing Home Compare, and Physician Compare.
However, the websites have in some cases raised headaches as when CMS went forward with publishing its individual physician scores for Physician Compare late last year despite opposition from the American Medical Association, which argued the site's incomplete data would actually be misleading rather than clarifying to patients.
In another difficult moment, The Department of Veterans Affairs found itself in an awkward position this summer after reportedly being asked by CMS to hold off on submitting information for Hospital Compare until a new data sharing agreement was in place. This brought further scrutiny to the already embattled agency until its participation was recently restored.
The site also includes quality star ratings and clinical quality data, and will now feature two additional quality measures. The standardized infection ratio (SIR) looks at a facility's bloodstream infections in the context of national baseline data, whereas the pediatric peritoneal dialysis Kt/V measure reveals the percent of eligible pediatric peritoneal dialysis patients who experienced sufficient waste removal from their blood.
The methodology for determining facility star ratings is also getting updates that include a reflection of a facility's improvement or decline, as well as a limit to the impact on star ratings of extreme outlier performance on a single measure.