February 24 2025
OASIS

Has the Change in the Home Health Star Rating Impacted Your Agency?

by Marian Essey, RN, BSN, COS-C

With the October 2024 refresh of Care Compare, the measures used to calculate the Home Health Quality of Patient Care Star Rating changed. The Acute Care Hospitalization claims-based measure was removed from the star rating calculation and was replaced with the Home Health Within Stay Potentially Preventable Hospitalization (PPH) measure. PPH is also a claims-based measure. Let’s look at how this change may be impacting your agency’s star rating.

	Acute Care Hospitalization Measure (REMOVED	Potentially Preventable Hospitalization Measure (NEW)
When does a patient hospitalization count negatively toward the measure?	Hospitalizations within the 1st 60 days of home health	Hospitalizations/OBS stays during entire home health stay from admission to discharge.
What events trigger a negative outcome?	Any unplanned admission to an acute care hospital	Any of the following potentially preventable events (per CMS definition in the measure specifications): Unplanned admission to an acute care hospital, or Unplanned admission to a long-term care hospital (LTCH), or Observation stay at a hospital
What hospitalizations don’t count negatively?	Planned hospitalizations don’t impact measure results negatively	Hospitalizations or observation that are Planned, or Are not potentially preventable (per CMS definition in the measure specifications) don’t impact measure results negatively
What are the national rates?	13.8% July 2024 national average (Last reported on Star Rating Preview Report)	9.8% October 2024 national average (First reported on Star Rating Preview Report)

When looking at your star rating results, remember that this change in the measures may have a big impact on your star rating. As with all claims-based measure results on Care Compare, the PPH measure in the star ratings is only updated once a year, typically in October.

Therefore, the PPH results from October 2024 will be the same PPH results in the star rating reported in January 2025, April 2025, and July 2025. How is this change impacting your agency’s star rating?