A patient-centered vision for post-acute care reform.

Over the past few years, CMS has urged senior leadership to develop strategic policy directions and initiatives to improve the nation’s healthcare system. CMS believes that the post-acute care product is not well defined. Differences in assessment instruments make detailed comparisons across the settings difficult and/or impossible. Without a uniform patient assessment methodology for postacute care patients, CMS believes the result is care fragmentation, unsafe care transitions, and inability to determine cost effective settings for each patient discharged to post-acute care. Therefore, one of the most important priorities was to develop a plan for post-acute care (PAC) reform.