Medicare has decided that hospitals should be graded on two things that rarely make it into a discharge summary: whether anyone checked a patient's nutritional status, and whether anyone asked what the patient would want if they could no longer speak for themselves.
In the inpatient payment rule finalized on July 31, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services adopted an Advance Care Planning electronic clinical quality measure and finalized "mandatory reporting for the Malnutrition Care Score eCQM," both beginning with the FY 2030 payment determination. Both measures were also adopted for the eleven specialty cancer hospitals that report under a separate program, with voluntary reporting in FY 2030 and mandatory reporting in FY 2031.
