CMS issues FY 2016 inpatient psychiatric facility final rule

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services late today issued its inpatient psychiatric facility final rule for fiscal year 2016. The rule will increase IPF rates by 1.5% in FY 2016, after accounting for inflation and other adjustments. Specifically, the final rule includes an initial market-basket update of 2.4% for those hospitals that submit data on quality measures; hospitals not submitting data will receive a 0.4% update. The rule also will make a 0.5 percentage point cut for productivity and an additional 0.2 percentage point market-basket cut, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act, and a 0.2 percentage point decrease resulting from an updated outlier threshold. Beginning in 2016, CMS will 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 will change the IPF quality measure set by adding five new measures and removing three. The agency also will 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 final rule will take effect Oct. 1.