Watch Out, Hospitals: Medicare's Planning To Punish You If You Misbehave

Recently published in Forbes, it used to be that hospitals billed Medicare for the services they provided, and Medicare–I know this is crazy!–simply paid the bills.

Those days are rapidly receding into history. Soon, a significant chunk of hospital revenue will be at risk, under a series of Medicare pay-for-performance programs. The idea behind P4P (as the cool kids call it) is simple. Third-party payers, like insurance companies or the Medicare program, will monitor the quality of care offered by healthcare providers like hospitals. High-quality providers will receive more money than low-quality ones, thereby giving providers an incentive to improve the quality of care they provide.

Medicare has created several P4P programs which, unless they are halted by the Trump administration, are slowly coming into effect. By 2017, as I will show in a bit, these programs could put a sixth of Medicare payment at risk.

What are these programs?

One is the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program, or (and you have to give Medicare folks kudos for their marketing prowess) VBP. Under VBP, Medicare monitors a bunch of quality measures, like the rate of hospital-acquired infections, the number of patients falling while in the hospital and even the risk-adjusted mortality of hospitalized patients. Medicare scores each hospital based on how well it performs compared to other hospitals, and compared to its previous performance. This score determines part of a reward or punishment at the end of the year. By 2017, 2% of Medicare hospital payments will be redistributed according to VBP results, with money transferred from low- to high-performing hospitals.

Medicare has created another acronymically-challenged program, HRRP, which stands for Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program. The program measures how often patients with diagnoses like heart attacks, congestive heart failure and pneumonia are readmitted to hospitals after an initial stay. The program will financially penalize hospitals that have excessive readmission rates.

Follow the link below to learn more about these programs:

Forbes – Watch Out, Hospitals: Medicare’s Planning To Punish You If You Misbehave