Status as of August 4, 2026. All five deliverables below are live in HPMS. The 2025 Cohort 28 HOS baseline is scheduled for mid-November 2026.

What landed

CMS announced five items in its July 31, 2026 HPMS memo on the 2026 Medicare HOS. All of them are under HPMS, Quality and Performance, HOS.

  • Cohort 26 performance measurement report, covering 2023 through 2025
  • Cohort 26 Star Ratings validation
  • Cohort 26 aggregate score analysis
  • 2025 Round 28 HEDIS HOS Effectiveness of Care report
  • Cohort 26 performance measurement data at the beneficiary level

If your contract did not participate in Cohort 26 performance measurement or Round 28 HEDIS HOS, there are no contract-specific reports for you this cycle.

Why this year is not a routine release

Improving or Maintaining Physical Health and Improving or Maintaining Mental Health carried a weight of 1 in the 2026 Star Ratings because they returned as new measures after a specification change. Both move to weight 3 for the 2027 Star Ratings. CMS said so in the 2026 Star Ratings fact sheet and Table IV-1 of the CY2027 Advance Notice confirms it.

The validation report that landed July 31 is built from the Cohort 26 baseline in 2023 and the follow up in 2025. That is the same data that produces the 2027 rating on those two measures. So the report covers a window that already closed, on measures that now count three times as much. There is nothing forward-looking in it. The weight change and the report availability were published in two unrelated CMS documents, which is why the pairing tends to go unnoticed.

What to check in the report

  1. Open the Star Ratings validation first. Confirm the contract-level results for the two Improving or Maintaining measures match what your internal projection assumed. A weight 3 surprise is a different conversation than a weight 1 surprise.
  2. Then the aggregate score analysis. It benchmarks your contract against state, region and national on average physical and mental component summary scores, the share reporting worse health than a year ago, problems with two or more activities of daily living, two or more chronic conditions, depressive symptoms, BMI of 30 or higher, sleep duration and quality, and the share deceased within two years of baseline. Read the mortality and chronic condition rows before you conclude anything about your quality work. A sicker cohort explains a lot of movement.
  3. Keep the two measure families separate. The two Improving or Maintaining measures come from Cohort 26 baseline plus follow up. The three HEDIS HOS measures, Monitoring Physical Activity, Reducing the Risk of Falling and Improving Bladder Control, come from the 2025 Cohort 26 follow up plus the 2025 Cohort 28 baseline. They are not reading the same members, so do not use one to explain the other.
  4. Request the beneficiary-level file if you want to act on it. Member-level HOS data does not come from HPMS. It comes from Health Services Advisory Group at HOS@hsag.com, free, as an encrypted CSV over secure file transfer. Have the designated recipient, plan address, recipient phone number and your CMS contract numbers ready when you ask. HSAG support is (888) 880-0077.
  5. Note what is not coming until November. The 2025 Cohort 28 HOS baseline arrives in HPMS in mid-November 2026, so Cohort 26 is what the next quarter of planning runs on.

What the report does not tell you

It is not your 2027 star. A measure rate becomes a star only when CMS applies cut points, and those come with the Star Ratings release. It also does not hand you a to-do list. HOS is longitudinal by design, the sample is random, and the measurement window for the 2027 rating closed in 2025. What the report supports is an accurate forecast now and a two-year plan for the cohorts still open.

For the mechanics of the survey itself, the cohort schedule and how HOS differs from CAHPS, see the HOS primer. For everything else changing in the 2027 measure set, weights and reward factor, see the 2027 Star Ratings changes.

Where Pelica fits

Nothing closes a HOS gap in August. What moves those measures is whether falls risk, bladder control and physical activity actually get addressed during ordinary care across a two-year cohort window, and whether the chronic conditions underneath get managed. That is care management work with a long tail, and it is the first thing a small team drops when the panel is large.

Pelica puts a copilot next to the care management and quality teams and does the follow-up work rather than reporting on it. At the largest IPA in the country, teams cover two to three times more members on one live record without adding headcount, close more than 70% of transitions of care gaps within 30 days, and get back roughly 10 hours per user per week.

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