As the United States wrestles with reforming health care, hospitals participating in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Premier health care alliance Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) VBP project raised their overall quality by an average of 17.2% over 4 years based on their delivery of more than 30 nationally standardized and widely accepted care measures to patients in the 5 clinical areas.
The HQID is the first national project of its kind, designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. Hospitals participating in HQID include small/large, urban/rural, and teaching/non-teaching facilities that volunteered to report their quality data for five high-volume inpatient conditions using national measures of quality care.
In a press release, Premier cited the government’s scorecard for hospital quality, the Hospital Compare dataset. The HC data showed that by March 2008, HQID participants scored on average 6.9 % points higher (94.64 % to 87.36 %) than non-participants on 19 performance measures used by Hospital Compare.
“The HQID project is the only large-scale hospital value-based purchasing project showing that financial incentives can increase quality of care,” said Charlene Frizzera, acting administrator of CMS, in the press release. “CMS and Premier have built a substantial body of evidence showing that these types of payment reforms have a direct effect on improving quality and enhancing value.”
For more information about the program and these results, visit the Premier healthcare alliance news center.Source: Premier Press release.
