HHS Secretary Sends Congress Report on Medicare Hospital VBP Program |
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Written by U.S. Insurance News
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Thursday, 29 November 2007 |
Congress has the report. Now it’s up to that legislative body to act on the advice of the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Congress has the report. Now it’s up to that legislative body to act on the advice of the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt delivered to Congress a report on the Medicare Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program, in which he suggested that one way to improve Medicare for its beneficiaries is through its payment system.
“For Medicare beneficiaries to get higher quality health care, our payment system needs to encourage better care,” Leavitt said. “Paying hospitals for the quality of care they provide takes us closer to that goal.”
Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), agrees with the secretary’s assessment.
“Value-based purchasing would benefit Medicare beneficiaries and other health care consumers by encouraging higher quality hospital care,” Weems observed. “Under the plan, additional information would be collected and publicly disseminated to patients and health care providers so that they can make better health care decisions.”
For example, the plan calls for the availability of quality-of-care information to all patients on the CMS Hospital Compare Web site. Examples of this type of information, which some hospitals currently report, include how soon heart attack patients are given aspirin after arriving at a hospital, and how soon pneumonia patients are given an antibiotic.
The inclusion of a broad range of such measures in the VBP program would enable Medicare beneficiaries and other consumers to compare hospitals and make informed decisions about where to seek the best care.
The plan to implement the VBP program builds on the current Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payment Update program, which ties a portion of the Annual Payment Update under the Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) to a hospital’s reporting on a defined set of inpatient quality measures.
“Getting hospitals to report their quality measures was an important first step,” Weems said. “Now, building on that experience, we are taking the next step of actually rewarding hospitals for the quality of care they provide Medicare beneficiaries.”
Under VBP, a percentage of the hospital’s base operating payment for each discharge (the diagnosis related group, or DRG payment) would be contingent on the hospital’s performance on a specific set of measures.
The transition from pay-for-reporting to pay-for-performance would occur over a three-year period. Public reporting of quality measures on Medicare’s Hospital Compare site, a key component of the Reporting Hospital Quality program, would remain an essential component of VBP.
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