Medicare Monitors and Raises Quality in Hospitals
Medicare Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has been working on a pilot program for three years. The pilot program has involved over 250 hospitals and has monitored quality measures in those hospitals during that time, offering rewards for high quality.
This partnership between the hospital consortium and Premier and the CMS spent the three years working on the quality measures in the 250 hospitals that were part of the pilot. Premier reported that the results that were achieved included a 15.8% increase in quality in these hospitals that served 1.1 million patients. Premier President and CEO Richard Norling said, “The findings from the first three years of the project clearly show that transparency with rewards for quality achieves a higher level of performances in American hospitals.
This project actually brought up the performance standards of all hospitals involved to a better level, bringing those on the lower levels closer to the higher levels and closing the gap between them. This is great news, and if the pilot program works to raise quality levels in these 230 hospitals, it would be a tremendous idea to expand the program or at least use the standards and rewards in the pilot to improve quality of more hospitals throughout the country. The money saved because of the improvements of quality and efficiency could be used to fund the pilots or other programs for other hospitals in other areas across the country.
There was an announcement by Acting CMS Administrator Kerry Weems said in a statement, “Given these results it is time for us 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.”
