Discharge Planning Rule Supports Interoperability and Patient Preferences

On September 26, CMS issued a final rule that empowers patients preparing to move from acute care into Post-Acute Care (PAC), a process called discharge planning. The rule puts patients in the driver’s seat of their care transitions and improves quality by requiring hospitals to provide patients access to information about PAC provider choices, including performance on important quality measures and resource-use measures, including:

• Number of pressure ulcers
• Proportion of falls that lead to injury
• Number of readmissions back to the hospital

The rule also:

• Advances CMS’s interoperability efforts by requiring the seamless exchange of patient information between health care settings, and ensuring that a patient’s health care information follows them after discharge from a hospital or PAC provider.
• Revises the discharge planning requirements that hospitals (including long-term care hospitals, Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) psychiatric hospitals, children’s hospitals, and cancer hospitals), inpatient rehabilitation facilities, and home health agencies must meet to participate in Medicare and Medicaid programs. It requires the discharge planning process to focus on a patient’s goals and treatment preferences. Hospitals are mandated to ensure each patient’s right to access their medical records in an electronic format.
• Implements requirements from the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act of 2014 (IMPACT Act) that includes how facilities will account for and document a patient’s goals of care and treatment preferences.

Hospitals and CAHs are already conducting most of the revised discharge planning requirements, with the exception of the discharge planning requirements of the IMPACT Act.

For More Information: 

• Fact Sheet
• Final Rule

See the full text of this excerpted CMS Press Release (Issued September 26).