News: PEPPER for short-term acute care hospitals released for fourth quarter 2017

CMS released its Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Reports (PEPPER) with statistics from the fourth 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 provider-specific data statistics for Medicare services that may be at risk for improper payments. Providers can use the data to support internal auditing and monitoring activities, according to the CMS release.

A facility’s PEPPER isn’t just useful for providers, however. The data included in the PEPPER can be used for CDI program benchmarking and it can illuminate areas of further CDI opportunity.

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

Editor’s note: To learn more about PEPPER, how to access your reports, and how to leverage them, read this article from the November/December edition of the CDI Journal and this Q&A with Boot Camp Instructor Sharme Brodie, RN, CCDS. To learn how other facility’s use their PEPPER, click here. To read the CMS release, click here.