Capacity Updates
In early July, CROWNWeb’s capacity was increased by 33 percent in an effort to help boost the system’s performance and improve processing speed. This increase helped minimize the number of errors that displayed related to system capacity, and helped reduce the number of unexpected timeouts.
Encouraged by the positive feedback received as a result of this modification, in early August, CMS implemented another capacity increase. The additional capacity improved system responsiveness and stability. While these changes have not eliminated all of the challenges that users have encountered, the updates to CROWNWeb’s capacity coupled with the efforts of end users to ensure that their computers meet CROWNWeb’s system specifications have helped users with their data submission efforts.
Data Submission Deadlines
CROWNWeb data submission began with May’s patient and clinical data. Per CMS’ data submission guidelines, facilities have a month’s lag time to report their clinical data, which means that May 2012 data would have been due by the end of June. However, prior to the CROWNWeb National Release, CMS gave users a one-month grace period to allow them to become accustomed to using CROWNWeb, and set a deadline of July 2012 for the submission of May 2012 patient and clinical data.
With an understanding of the CROWNWeb performance concerns that were affecting the ability of facilities to meet the data submission deadline of July 31, 2012, CMS announced in July that the agency was extending the submission date for May 2012 data to August 31, 2012, and was adding an extra month to the June and July data submission periods as well.
These extensions were designed to give facilities additional time to submit their data, while CMS continued to monitor CROWNWeb’s usage and facility compliance with the data submissions.
Currently, over 85 percent of Medicare-certified facilities have successfully submitted their May 2012 patient and clinical data to CMS via CROWNWeb.
