SPECIAL NOTICE
B -- Trends in Nursing Home-Hospice Contracting and Common Ownership Between Hospice Agencies and Nursing Homes - SOW
- Notice Date
- 6/5/2017
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- NAICS
- 611310
— Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools
- Contracting Office
- Department of Health and Human Services, Program Support Center, Acquisition Management Services, 7700 Wisconsin Ave, Bethesda, Maryland, 20857, United States
- ZIP Code
- 20857
- Solicitation Number
- 17-233-SOL-00426
- Archive Date
- 7/5/2017
- Point of Contact
- David Wilhelm, Phone: 3014924643
- E-Mail Address
-
david.wilhelm@psc.hhs.gov
(david.wilhelm@psc.hhs.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- Statement of Work Notice of Intent: The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) within the Department of Health and Human Services intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with Vanderbilt University School of Medicine under the authority of FAR 6.302-1 for the project entitled, "Trends in Nursing Home-Hospice Contracting and Common Ownership between Hospice Agencies and Nursing Homes" under FAR Part 15 procedures. Recent research suggests that there may be financial incentives for hospices and nursing homes with joint ownership to increase hospice referrals to patients in their nursing homes. Although it is unclear how the quality and appropriateness of hospice care may be affected, these financial incentives may represent a conflict of interest that influences admissions to and utilization of hospice care. In addition, to focusing broadly on nursing home-hospice contracting, this project will produce descriptive statistics about joint ownership and explore the implications of such ownership structures on hospice use and referral patterns for patients in their nursing homes. Outcomes of interest will include any use of hospice before death (e.g., among nursing home decedents and residents with limited prognosis), length of hospice use, live discharge from hospice, and frequency of skilled hospice visits overall and at the very end of life. The policy analysis will also examine in detail how facility level hospice use is impacted by such ownership arrangements. Findings from the project will inform policy discussions concerning hospice payment and quality of care in the Medicare hospice benefit. This project builds on a recently completed hospice project, Tracking the Impact of Ownership Changes in Hospice Care Provided to Medicare Beneficiaries. Vanderbilt (the contractor) has already coded the chain and ownership status of all hospice agencies nationally. This process involved coding Medicare costs reports from 2000-2013 for all hospice agencies that were free-standing or affiliated with hospitals, home health agencies, and skilled nursing facilities. To ensure the quality of this coding, the project also cross-checked this information with other available data about hospice agencies, including Provider of Service files and Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS) data. Although their use for the prior project was exploratory, PECOS data will be essential in this follow-on project. This project will integrate the initial hospice ownership coding that was achieved using cost reports and supplementary data sources with the rich ownership data contained in PECOS. In particular, PECOS data can be used to identify instances of common ownership between hospice agencies and nursing homes, as individual and organizational owners with ownership stakes of 5% or higher are listed in the PECOS data and can be cross-referenced. Vanderbilt has already performed preliminary analyses of the PECOS data to define and explore joint ownership between hospice agencies and nursing homes and has extensive experience and the necessary background knowledge from the prior research to move forward with this research immediately. These data have a very different structure from the longitudinal data structures that are typical of cost reports and Provider of Service files. In particular, PECOS data are current to the date at which they are extracted, and investigators must populate observations back in time based on records of changes observed in the data. Based on previous work by Vanderbilt comparing PECOS data to other provider datasets (e.g., including cost reports, OSCAR/CASPER, and provider of service files), PECOS data are somewhat reliable back to 2005, with even better reliability from 2010 forward. Finally, Vanderbilt plans to integrate all ownership details with information from other Medicare administrative datasets, including the Minimum Data Set and Medicare hospice claims, both of which were completed in the context of the prior project (through 2013). Reflecting the likely availability of Medicare claims and MDS data, the proposed project will seek to integrate these datasets through 2015. The scope of work is available and attached. All responsible sources may submit a capability statement or proposal, which shall be considered by the agency, electronically to David Wilhelm at David.Wilhelm@psc.hhs.gov. Responses are due by June 20, 2017 by 12:00 pm EST. Responses will not be accepted after the due date. If no capability statements or proposals are received which specifically demonstrate the ability to perform the requirements above, the Government shall proceed with negotiating a firm fixed price contract with Vanderbilt University.
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/HHS/PSC/DAM/17-233-SOL-00426/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: Contractor location, United States
- Record
- SN04532096-W 20170607/170605234517-b5d5824645327ac6ea9b360240b9d212 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)
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