The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Friday that it will delay at least four months' updates to its 20-year-old data reporting system, which is important to nursing home compliance efforts.
Federal regulators told the state research agency they are planning to move nursing homes of the Internet quality improvement and assessment system, known as the widely known IQIES, to a cloud-based version.
The transition was initially set for last month.
IQIE captures important information from nursing homes, including patient assessments and diagnostic information from the minimum dataset. Surveyors use the system to create long-term care surveys, confirm quotations, navigate the conflict resolution process, write revisions and exemption plans, and track their own working hours.
IQIE has absorbed some old reporting features and tools and has discontinued software such as the Automated Survey Process Environment (Aspen) and the Java-based Resident Evaluation Verification and Entry System (Jraven).
But now, IQIE components need an upgrade.
“The current legacy Qies environment supporting research and certification, patient assessment, CLIA and other areas has been in place for over 20 years,” CMS wrote in an updated memo sent Friday to the state office. “The CMS has identified the need to modernize this tool to address outdated technology, security vulnerabilities, and the need to identify increased costs of updating and maintaining legacy Qies.”
Some of these updates began in 2023 and were instructed by skilled nurses to appoint facility-level security personnel to apply for the background checks needed to access the new platform.
The same system is designed for use by other post-acute providers. Home health institutions first moved to IQIES in the second half of 2021.
A software engineer working for a long-term care vendor in 2022 reported a “lumpy migration” to home care users over several months, losing data and changing data.
That will undoubtedly be in the minds of long-term care users over the next few months.
“Whenever there is a change in the process, normal activities should be disrupted,” Amy Stewart, chief nursing director for the American Association of Acute Care Nursing, told McKnight's Long-Term Care News on Monday. “We are pleased to see the live “Office Hour” call being implemented prior to its release in July. Hopefully these calls will help you identify the problem and resolve them before launching. ”
CMS said Friday that the IQIES team is developing training and support plans to help all state agencies and CMS staff prepare for the transition to the new platform. The training organized by CMS will take place in April, May and June.
The CMS will ultimately move all post-acute providers to the platform, and the agency says it may add other features, such as reporting pay-based journal stuffing information.
