Development and Maintenance of Standardized Cross Setting Patient Assessment Data for Post-Acute Care

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) contracted with the RAND Corporation to identify and develop standardized items for use in post-acute care patient assessment instruments. RAND was tasked by CMS with developing and testing items within five areas of focus that fall under the clinical categories delineated in the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act of 2014: (1) cognitive function and mental status; (2) special services, treatments, and interventions; (3) medical conditions and comorbidities; (4) impairments; and (5) other categories. This report presents results of the Alpha 2 feasibility test of a set of candidate items for assessing some of these focus areas. Conducted between April 2017 and July 2017, the test was the second of two Alpha tests used to assess the feasibility of candidate items. Like the Alpha 1 test, the results of this small-scale feasibility test informed the design of the national Beta test.