Average Inpatient Quality Reporting Performance Rates

> Under the new ValueBased Purchasing program, hospitals will receive incentive payments based on how well they perform on 12 clinical process measures and nine patient experience measures or on how much their performance improves relative to a baseline performance period. > It is likely that as many hospitals will be penalized with payment reductions under the program as will benefit from payment increases from the incentive payments. > It can be argued that the true significance of the program is not so much in the incentive payments as it is in the measurement tools it provides. On April 28, 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) formally launched a new initiative designed to adjust Medicare reimbursement on the basis of quality measurements. The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program, administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), marks an unprecedented change in the way Medicare pays healthcare providers for their services. The VBP seeks to reward hospitals for improving the quality of care by redistributing Medicare payment among them so that hospitals with higher performance in terms of quality receive a greater proportion of the payment than do the lower performing hospitals. Details of the program are described in a final rule published May 6, 2011, which will become effective for inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) discharges on or after Oct. 1, 2012.