News: PEPPER released for short-term acute care hospitals

CMS recently released its Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Reports (PEPPER) with statistics from the first quarter of fiscal year 2017 for short-term acute care hospitals nationwide.

The reports, distributed by TMF Health Quality Institute under contract with CMS, summarize facility-specific data statistics for Medicare services that may be at risk for improper payments. Facilities can then use the data to support internal auditing and monitoring, according to CMS’ release.

The reports were distributed last week through a QualityNet secure file exchange to hospital QualityNet Administers and user accounts with the PEPPER recipient role, according to CMS.

To learn more about PEPPER and how to leverage the reports, consider attending this webinar on June 27.

Editor’s note: To learn how other facilities have used their PEPPERs, click here. To read about how best to use PEPPER, click here. For information about using PEPPER to search for CDI targets, click here. To view a presentation about using PEPPER to revitalize your CDI program, click here.