Are HRRP’s readmission reductions an illusion?

A number of studies (e.g., Wasfy et al. 2017, Desai et al. 2016) have found that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) reduce hospital readmissions. However, are these findings valid? A recent paper by Ody et al. (2019) argues maybe not. Because readmission rates are risk-adjusted, changing coding…

The costs of quality reporting

Provider pay-for-performance initiatives aim to increase reimbursement to physicians and others who provide high-quality, low-cost care to patients. Medicare has two main programs for physicians to ahcieve these goals: (i) the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and (ii) the Alternative Payment Models (APM).  MIPS measures cost and quality for smaller physicians groups whereas APM requires…

Why do physician practices join value-based payment initiatives?

Are physicians ready for value-based payment? That is the question a recent paper by Markovitz et al. (2017) attempts to answer. This question is not hypothetical as the Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (MACRA) requires physicians to choose between the current fee-for-service structure under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) or…

Can physician quality be captured by a single composite measure?

Value-based payment for providers is often predicated on being able to measure physician quality with a single composite measures.  For instance, Medicare’ s Value-Based Payment Modifier (Value Modifier) combines a variety of individual quality metrics across domains to create a single quality score.  Payment to physicians is adjusted based on a combination of physician quality…

Measuring the quality of cancer care

How do you measure the quality of care patients with cancer receive?  How long they live?  Avoiding side effects?  Patient satisfaction? Process measures? Further, there are multiple types of cancer and different cancer have different recommended treatments and methods of providing care.  To further complicate the issue, new cancer treatments are being introduced in rapid succession;…

Another VBP fail?

Value-based purchasing is supposed to tie reimbursement to quality of care and costs.  Providers that are high quality and low cost are supposed to get higher reimbursement, those that are low quality and high cost the reverse.  The key question is: does this reimbursement approach work in practice? According to a recent study by Grabowski…

ACOs and VBP

Accountable Care Organizations aim to link providers through the supply chain (i.e., hospitals, physicians, post-acute care facilities) to incentivize providers to improve quality and reduce costs.  In addition to its ACO program (the Medicare Shared Savings Program), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have implemented a number of value-based payment programs, including the…

Regulatory Tsunami?

Medicare is working hard to make sure that doctors are efficiently providing high-quality care. Programs such as the Physician Quality Reporting System (PRQS) and the Value-Based Payment Modifier all are aimed to improve quality and lower cost. The downside of such programs, however, is that the impose reporting burdens on physicians. For instance, Medicare can…

Will P4P work?

In pay-for-performance (P4P) or value-based purchasing (VBP) schemes, health care provider reimbursement rates depend on performance. Physicians can receive bonuses for following best practices, and hospitals can increase reimbursement rates from Medicare if they improve clinical processes and patient satisfaction. As an economist, rewarding good performance with financial payments makes perfect sense. Or does it?…

Did 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 for hospitals that demonstrate high quality. A paper by Ryan et al. (2014) explains the program in more detail. Under HVBP, acute care hospitals—those paid under Medicare’s Inpatient…