In-Home Health Risk Assessments And Chart Reviews Contribute To Coding Intensity In Medicare Advantage

There is widespread agreement that taxpayers pay more when Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans than if those beneficiaries were enrolled in traditional Medicare. MA plans are paid on the basis of submitted diagnoses and thus have a clear incentive to encourage providers to find and report as many diagnoses for their enrollees as possible. Two mechanisms that MA plans use to identify diagnoses that are not available for beneficiaries in traditional Medicare are in-home health risk assessments and chart reviews. Using MA encounter data for 2015-20, I isolated the impact of these two types of encounters on the risk scores used for payments to MA plans during 2016-21. I found that encounter-based risk scores for MA enrollees were higher by 0.091 points, or 7.4 percent, in 2021 when in-home health risk assessments and chart reviews were included than they would have been without the use of these tools.