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…

90% of health plans think the use of alternative payment models will increase in the coming years

A recent report from the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (HCP LAN) examines how providers are getting paid in the U.S. today.  Traditionally, health care providers (e.g., physicians, hospitals) were paid via fee-for-service (FFS).  Fee-for-service means that every time a provider does a service, they get paid.  This is truly largely regardless of…

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…

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;…

Can we accurately classify physicians as high vs. low quality?

Medicare aims to tie 90% of reimbursement to quality measures.  The potential for quality-linked reimbursement to incentivized improved quality of care, however, depends critically on whether physician quality can be measured reliably. Profiling individual physicians is difficult. Sample sizes are small and attributing patients to a single physician can be difficult (as Mehtrotra et al. 2010…

Tell me what you really think

I wrote last week about whether pay-for-performance (P4P) are doomed to fail.  One group of providers–physicians–certainly does not appreciate the current P4P programs instituted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  In a press release, the American Medical Association stated: …it appears that CMS has made significant improvements  by recasting the EHR Meaningful Use program and by…