CMS issues proposed FY 2016 inpatient psychiatric facility rule

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services late Friday issued its inpatient psychiatric facility proposed rule for fiscal year 2016. The rule would increase IPF rates by 1.6% in FY 2016 compared to FY 2015, after accounting for inflation and other adjustments. Specifically, the proposed rule includes an initial market-basket update of 2.7% for those hospitals that submit data on quality measures; hospitals not submitting data would receive a 0.7% update. The rule also would make a productivity cut of 0.6% and an additional market-basket cut of 0.2%, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act, and decrease of 0.3% resulting from an updated outlier threshold. Beginning in 2016, CMS proposes to replace the Rehabilitation, Psychiatric and Long-Term Care market basket with a new, IPF-specific market basket based on data from both freestanding and hospital-based IPFs. In addition, CMS proposes to change the IPF quality measure set by adding five new measures and removing three. The agency also would change some data reporting requirements, such as requiring IPFs to report measure data as a single, yearly count instead of by quarter and patient age. The proposed rule will be published in the May 1 Federal Register and comments will be accepted through June 23.