So Much Talk, So Little Walk on Quality

By CECI CONNOLLY Quality is all the rage in health care these days. It rolls off the presidential tongue and is at the heart of robust targets set by  Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell. (No less than half of all Medicare payments to be quality based by the end of 2018!) “We’re moving Medicare toward a payment model that rewards quality of care instead of quantity of care,” President Obama declared at a March 2015 summit dedicated to alternative payment models that move away from volume-based, fee-for-service payment Industry is on the rhetorical bandwagon too. A quick search for the word quality on THCB turns up 277 entries – including “Zen and the Quest for Quality,” “An F for Quality” and the very earliest entry dated Aug. 18, 2003, “Performance-based pay in health care?” Don’t get me wrong.  We at the Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP) were into quality way before quality was cool. (We were there at the creation of today’s HEDIS quality measures.)  So perhaps that’s why it’s a little disheartening to see policymakers slow to match the speeches  with action by fixing a glitch in the pay-for-quality movement. The hiccup comes in implementing two provisions in the Affordable Care Act: one aimed at controlling costs by capping total payments to Medicare Advantage plans and another that rewards  the highest-quality plans, scored on a scale of 1 to-5 “stars.” Remember the goal is to incentivize and reward quality. The...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs