APTA Announces 2023 Honors and Awards Program Recipients

APTA's Honors and Awards program celebrates outstanding achievements on the part of association members in the areas of overall accomplishment, education, practice and service, publications, research, and academic excellence. APTA has announced the 2023 Honors and Awards Program recipients, and it is our pleasure to announce that the following members from APTA Home Health have been selected to receive the following awards:

Lucy Blair Service Award - (Practice & Service Award) The Lucy Blair Service Award honors physical therapist members or physical therapist life members whose contributions to APTA are of exceptional quality. Qualifying contributions can pertain to association components, through work on appointed or elected positions, and/or in other capacities at the association and component levels.

• Eva Norman, PT, DPT
  

State Legislative Leadership Award - This award recognizes and rewards component leaders in the area of state legislative leadership who bring increased awareness and involvement to state legislative issues and who achieve success in state legislative issues that strengthen the practice of physical therapy.

• Michael R. Riley, PT
  

In conjunction with the 2024 APTA Leadership Congress, award recipients will be recognized next year at the APTA Honors & Awards ceremony on Sunday, July 21, in Kansas City, Missouri. A reception hosted by the PT Fund will take place that afternoon, with the ceremony immediately following the 29^th John H.P. Maley Lecture, scheduled to begin at 7:00 pm. 

Who Should Get a COVID Vaccine This Year?

Reuters | By Michael Erman

(Reuters) - The U.S. drug regulator authorized updated COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech as well as from Moderna on Monday as the country prepares to start an autumn vaccination campaign as soon as this week. A third vaccine from Novavax remains under review.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the shots for those aged 12 and above, and authorized them for emergency use in children aged 6 months through 11 years. Advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are set to meet on Tuesday to discuss recommendations on who should get the vaccines this year. CDC Director Mandy Cohen said last month she expects the shots to be given annually, but not all doctors agree everyone needs them each year.

How is this year's vaccine different from last year?

Pfizer with BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax all have created new versions of their COVID-19 vaccines. Unlike last year's booster shot that included the original strain of the virus and the then-dominant Omicron variant, this year's shot targets only XBB.1.5, the predominant variant through most of 2023.

The companies have said their retooled vaccines have been shown in early testing to work against newer Omicron subvariants now circulating, including the highly mutated BA.2.86.

Should seniors, the immunocompromised and pregnant people get the shot this year?

There is broad consensus among doctors that these groups should receive at least an annual COVID-19 vaccine to protect against the virus because of their elevated risk of severe disease, hospitalization and death. For instance, the British government's vaccine committee said only adults 65 and older and some of these other categories will be offered the shot as they are the most likely to benefit…

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HHS Announces Stronger Protections for Those with Disabilities

Home Care Insider

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a proposed rule that would update, clarify, and strengthen the statute that prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs and activities that receive Federal financial assistance or are conducted by a Federal agency.

The proposed rule provides greater protections for people with disabilities in federally funded health and human services programs and helps ensure that people with disabilities are not subjected to discrimination in any program or activity receiving funding from HHS simply because they have a disability.

Specifically, the proposed rule:

• Ensures that medical treatment decisions are not based on biases or stereotypes about individuals with disabilities, judgments that an individual will be a burden on others or beliefs that the life of an individual with a disability has less value than the life of a person without a disability;
• Clarifies obligations for web, mobile, and kiosk accessibility;
• Establishes enforceable standards for accessible medical equipment;
• Clarifies requirements in HHS-funded child welfare programs and activities;
• Prohibits the use of value assessment methods that place a lower value on life-extension for individuals with disabilities when that method is used to limit access or to deny aids, benefits, and services; and
• Clarifies obligations to provide services in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of individuals with disabilities.

Home Health Agencies Fail to Report More than 50% of Falls Leading to Major Injuries, OIG Finds

McKnight’s Home Care | By Adam Healy
 
Home health agencies neglected to report 55% of falls leading to major injuries and hospitalizations on their Outcome Assessment Information Set (OASIS) assessments, according to a study conducted by the U.S. Office of Inspector General.
 
OIG analyzed hospital claims for Medicare home health patients and identified those that included a fall. This was compared to the home health provider’s OASIS assessments and its fall rate report on Care Compare. OASIS falls reporting was worse among young home health patients, along with those who identified as Hispanic, Black and Asian. Of 39,900 falls identified that resulted in major injury, 85% led to a bone fracture and 11% led to “head injury with altered consciousness,” according to the report.
 
For-profit home health agencies came up worse than other agencies in reporting Medicare home health patients’ falls. During the one-year period examined between 2020 and 2021, for-profit agencies failed to report 56% of falls. That compares to the failure to report falls among nonprofit agencies (52%) and government-run agencies (38%).
 
A major red flag was the lack of reporting about a hospitalization related to the fall on the OASIS assessment, OIG found. 
 
“For many Medicare home health patients who fell and were hospitalized, there was no OASIS assessment at all associated with the hospitalization, which raises additional concerns about potential noncompliance with data submission requirements and its impact on the accuracy of information about falls with major injury on Care Compare,” the report said.
 
Noncompliant OASIS reporting would lead to incomplete or misleading fall rate statistics on Care Compare, OIG noted.
 
“These patient assessments are used by CMS to monitor and provide public information about home health care quality,” said Ann Maxwell, deputy inspector general for evaluation and inspection, in the report. “Due to this high rate of non-reporting, Care Compare may not provide accurate information about the incidence of these falls.”
 
OIG found that that home health agencies with the lowest Care Compare major injury fall rates reported falls less often than agencies with higher Care Compare fall rates. This indicated “that Care Compare does not provide the public with accurate information about how often home health patients fell.”
 
OIG made four recommendations to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to remediate the issue of non-reporting. These recommendations included taking steps to ensure falls are reported in OASIS assessments and using other data sources to develop more accurate reporting measures. 
 
In a letter to OIG, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure concurred with the inspector’s recommendations.
 
“CMS understands the importance of providing accurate quality information to home health agencies and the public,” Brooks-LaSure said. “CMS will explore opportunities to help promote the completeness and accuracy of the home health agency reported OASIS data used to calculate the falls with major injury quality measure, including additional OASIS outreach and educational opportunities.”