Hospital Quality Measures: Value Based Purchasing 2.0 (The Funny Version).

For years, hospital quality measures have been tracked by private and government insurance programs to try and improve the healthcare services received by their beneficiaries.  The most recent example is the Value-Based Purchasing Program (VBP) initiative by The Centers For Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).  How does CMS describe VBP?"Under the Program, CMS will make value-based incentive payments to acute care hospitals, based either on how well the hospitals perform on certain quality measures or how much the hospitals' performance improves on certain quality measures from their performance during a baseline period. The higher a hospital's performance or improvement during the performance period for a fiscal year, the higher the hospital's value-based incentive payment for the fiscal year would be."This complex program has many different elements that require hospitals and doctors to excel against their peers or face penalties and payment cuts. What are some hospital quality measures  being tracked under VBP?  There are Process of Care measures and  HCAHPS patient satisfaction surveys.    There are 30-Day Outcome Mortality measures and Patient Safety Indicators.  There are  the tracking of Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI) and hospital readmissions.  There's even efficiency measures that track spending per beneficiary. Other programs track 30 day this and 90 day that.  There are DRGs, MS-DRGs, comorbid condit...
Source: The Happy Hospitalist - Category: Internists and Doctors of Medicine Authors: Source Type: blogs