Medicare to Hospitals: The Patient is Always Right
Starting in fiscal year 2014, Medicare will start rewarding hospitals with high quality care and penalizing hospitals with low quality care. The rewards and penalties will be financial in nature....
View ArticleMedicare Reforms Linking Reimbursement Rates with Hospital Performance
Health reform not only changes the health care market for the demand side (e.g., patients, insurers), but also for the supply side (e.g., hospitals, physicians). In the Medicare setting, a number of...
View ArticleMeasuring Patient Case Mix in Medicare
How does Medicare measure patient case mix? For the most part, Medicare uses the Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) model. A recent CMS presentation describes the HCC model in more detail. Today...
View ArticleMedicare Spending per Beneficiary
Medicare’s Hospital Compare website evaluates hospital quality. One of the most recent measures to be added to Hospital Compare is a measure of efficiency. The measure calculates a...
View ArticleMedicare Payments Cut for Low-Quality Hospitals
In the past, Medicare basically paid hospitals the same amount for every type of admission regardless of quality. Of course, Medicare did adjust payments to hospitals based on the their cost of labor...
View ArticleWill Medicare Reduce Your Hospial’s Reimbursement Rates?
Do you work at New York-Presbyterian in Manhattan? Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston? Both these hospitals, with large market shares in their cities, will see their Medicare payments reduced...
View ArticleHow Medicare Measures Hospital Quality
There are many ways that Medicare evaluates hospital quality. Medicare conducts patient surveys (i.e,. HCAHPS). Medicare has hospitals report a variety of process of care measures through the Inpatient...
View ArticleDid Hospital VBP work?
How can Medicare improve quality and reduce cost? One idea is to introduce value-based purchasing (VBP). For instance, Medicare’s hospital value-based purchasing (HVBP) system increases payment rates...
View ArticleIs value-based purchasing working for hospitals?
The Incidental Economist is one of my favorite blogs to read. This week’s post on a recent BMJ article on the failure of P4P did not disappoint. The article (Figueroa et al. 2016) looks at 4267 acute...
View ArticleMedicare’s value-based purchasing fail?
Value-based payment is the latest hot topic. One question remains, however, does it work? Does paying for quality improve quality. A study by Zuckerman et al. (2016) finds that the hospital...
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