A pay-for-performance project has resulted in a 15.8 percent boost in quality over three years at 250 hospitals across the country, the Premier healthcare alliance reported Tuesday. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services awarded nearly $25 million under the joint initiate with Premier.
CMS awarded incentive payments of more than $7 million to 112 top-performing hospitals in Year 3.
For the third year of the program, Sacred Heart Medical Center, in Spokane, Wash., received the highest quality incentive payment of $385,342 for achieving top performance in four of the five clinical areas.
The project, which ran from 2003-2006, has been extended by CMS for an additional three years through September 2009.
Improvements in quality of care saved the lives of an estimated 2,500 heart attack patients across the first three years of the project, according to an analysis of mortality rates at hospitals participating in the project. Patients also received approximately 300,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures, such as smoking cessation, discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination, during that time.
Hospitals participating in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration - HQID - included small and large, urban and rural, teaching and non-teaching facilities in 36 states. The hospitals volunteered to report their quality data for five high-volume inpatient conditions using national measures of quality care.
The conditions are:
- acute myocardial infarction (AMI/heart attack);
- coronary artery bypass graft;
- heart failure;
- pneumonia; and
- hip and knee replacement.
The demonstration was designed to test new payment systems under Medicare that would improve the safety, quality and efficiency of care.
"These Premier results show that value-based purchasing can achieve excellent results in Medicare," said CMS Acting Administrator Kerry Weems. "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."
"The findings from the first three years of the HQID project clearly show that transparency with rewards for quality achieves a higher level of performance in American hospitals," said Richard Norling, president and chief executive officer of Premier. "This important connection between increased quality and performance creates value to patients, as well as the healthcare system."
The quality measures were developed by government and private organizations, such as the National Quality Forum, the American Hospital Association and the Leapfrog Group. In addition, they have been tested by CMS, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the Agency for Health Research Quality.
What major way has your hospital employed to improve quality of care over recent years? Send your comments to Editor Bernie Monegain at bernie.monegain@medtechpublishing.com.