Updated Dialysis Facility Care Compare on Medicare.gov (DFCC) Data Now Available

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is pleased to announce that new data about dialysis facilities are available on Dialysis Facility Care Compare on Medicare.gov—the website where patients and health centers can view and compare quality data about dialysis facilities. CMS uses these data, organized into a series of measures, to create two star rating systems that help ensure safety, quality, and transparency for dialysis facilities and that help patients make educated decisions about where to get their dialysis treatments.

What’s in the October 2024 Refresh?

Updates to Clinical Data

With the October 2024 release, the following clinical care quality measures on Dialysis Facility Care Compare have been updated with data from Calendar Year (CY) 2023:

• Adult and child patients who had enough waste removed from their blood during hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis
• Adult patients who had too much calcium in their blood
• Frequency of patient death, hospital admission, or readmission
• Frequency of transfusions
• Hemoglobin management (Downloadable Data Only)
• Phosphorus concentrations in the blood (Downloadable Data Only)
• Prevention of bloodstream infections
• Adult patients who received treatment through an arteriovenous fistula
• Adult patients who had a catheter (tube) left in a vein for at least 3 consecutive complete months, for their regular hemodialysis treatments
• Measurement of nPCR for pediatric hemodialysis patients
• Patients who were on the kidney or kidney-pancreas transplant waiting list
• Transplant waitlist within a year of dialysis initiation
• Emergency department encounters
• Emergency department encounters within 30 days of hospitalization
• Healthcare Personnel Vaccination

The following new measure has been added with this release, using data from CY2023:

• Access to home dialysis for new patients

The Patient Quality of Care Star Ratings have been updated with this release, also based on CY 2023 data. Details about the methodology for calculating the star ratings can be found in the technical notes on Dialysisdata.org.

Updates to Patient Experience of Care Data

The following individual measures and Star Ratings of ICH CAHPS (In-Center Hemodialysis Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems)Survey of Patients’ Experiences have been updated with data from the 2023 Spring and 2023 Fall surveys:

• Kidney doctor’s communication and caring
• Quality of dialysis center care and operations
• Providing information to patients
• Rating of kidney doctors
• Rating of dialysis center staff
• Rating of dialysis center