The exclusion in General Guideline 18 is optional. Members who die during the measurement year may be excluded from all measures, except the measures in the Health Plan Descriptive domain or the Risk Adjusted Utilization subdomain. However, if a member dies during the measurement year, the organization is not required to remove the member from all measures.
For example, if an organization identifies a deceased member during medical record review for the ABA measure, the member may be removed from the measure as a valid data error and replaced with a member from the oversample, but the organization is not required to remove the member from all other applicable HEDIS measures.
Additionally, there is no requirement to assess numerator compliance for deceased members and exclude the member only if they are not numerator compliant. NCQA does not prescribe how organizations identify deceased members using claim/encounter and enrollment data. Organizations must develop their own methods to identify these members.
HEDIS 2020