The Future is Nearly Upon Us: And With it Comes More Acronyms

PAC-PRD, the CARE tool, MDS 3.0 and the STRIVE study.

PAC-PRD (Post-Acute Care Payment Reform Demonstration)
CARE (Continuity Assessment Record and Evaluation)
MDS 3.0 (Minimum Data Set version 3.0)
STRIVE (Staff Time and Resource Intensity Verification)

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) are at the helm of the Post-Acute Care Payment Reform Demonstration program for which CMS is soliciting post-acute care participants.  The objective of the project is to have a single source from which continuity of care for the post-acute care patient can be tracked for quality of care and fiscal analysis.

A centralized, internet-based, uniform and standardized assessment instrument called the Continuity Assessment Record and Evaluation (CARE) tool has been designed to collect data from across various post-acute care providers.

The CARE tool will co-exist, as a parallel process, with Medicare/Medicaid-certified post-acute care providers that currently use the MDS (nursing home) instrument, the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS tool, required for home care providers and the Inpatient Rehab Facility Patient Assessment Instrument (IRF-PAI).

Data collection begins January 2008.
CMS is soliciting for participants.
CMS must report the outcome of the demonstration program to Congress by 2011.

And so, still another mountain to climb…