CMS Recognizes Hospitals In Medicare Pay-for-Performance Pilot Project With Financial Awards

Main Category: Medicare / Medicaid / SCHIP
Also Included In: Public Health
Article Date: 19 Jun 2008 - 9:00 PDT

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Officials from the hospital consortium Premier on Tuesday announced that CMS had awarded a total of $24.5 million to its highest-performing members in a Medicare pay-for-performance demonstration project, CQ HealthBeat reports (Cooley, CQ HealthBeat, 6/17).

The three-year project, a partnership between CMS and Premier, involved 250 hospitals, which reported on 30 clinical quality measures (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 2/4). Premier officials said the hospitals, which served 1.1 million patients, achieved a 15.8% average increase in overall quality. Premier President and CEO Richard Norling said, "The findings from the first three years of the ... project clearly show that transparency with rewards for quality achieves a higher level of performance in American hospitals."

A Premier press release said that researchers found over the course of the project the variation in quality scores between the highest- and lowest-performing member hospitals had declined.

Acting CMS Administrator Kerry Weems in a press release said, "Given these results, it is time to take the next step and implement hospital Value-Based Purchasing for the Medicare program, so that citizens across the nation can benefit from improved safety and quality [and] get the right care, every time" (CQ HealthBeat, 6/17).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

© 2008 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

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