hospital quality

How can hospitals benefit from the research being done by CMS on pay for performance? In part, just by accepting that improving quality results requires a high level of commitment, according to Richard Norling, CEO of Premier, which runs the P4P pilot on CMS's behalf. Norling, who's in Washington, DC this week for the American Hospital Association's annual meeting, conducted a briefing yesterday on lessons learned from the P4P demonstration program, the Hospital Quality Incentive …

Bowing to the pressures created by the consumer-driven healthcare trend, the Tennessee Hospital Association has created a website offering service prices for most of its 136 member hospitals. The site, which draws on data reported to the state from October 2003 to September 2004, list average prices for common procedures. HCA hospitals aren't included in the tally, but the site does link to HCA's own price disclosure sites. (HCA recently decided to disclose prices for common procedures at …

CMS has extended its pay-for-performance program for three more years, pleased with the results of the program's first two years of results. By CMS's measures, participating hospitals improved overall quality by 11.8 percent during the second year. In response, CMS paid out $8.7 million to the 115 hospitals that performed the best. The next three years of the program, the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration, will test two new P4P models, one for hospitals that meet a given …

Funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, JCAHO has announced plans to begin testing a comprehensive list of nursing-related performance measures. The idea behind the testing is to see whether the measures make sense, and should be used for national nursing quality improvement efforts. The measures, which are endorsed by the National Quality Forum, focus on hospital-based nursing, address patient outcomes, nursing-centered care interventions and process issues that tend …

While risk-adjusted mortality rates for elderly patients improved, the mortality rate gap between high-performing and poorly-performing hospitals has grown in recent years, according to research by healthcare rating firm HealthGrades. For its ninth annual study, HealthGrades analyzed 40.6 million Medicare records taken from 2003 through 2005, examining care at the nation's 5000 non-federal hospitals. The firm then gave hospitals a one, three or five-star rating based on outcomes in each …

Squeezing in under a state-mandated October 1 deadline for posting hospital pricing data online, the Minnesota Hospital Association (MHA) has become the latest hospital trade group to provide pricing data on member hospitals. The MHA just launched a new site providing detailed pricing data from specific Minnesota hospitals, offering data for the 50 most common in-patient procedures and 25 most common same-day procedures.

In forcing the issue of price reporting, the state of …

The first national pay for performance (P4P) conference wrapped in Los Angeles on Wednesday morning. Tuesday saw the big guns coming out, with Carolyn Clancy (head of the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality), Mark McLellan of CMS and health IT czar David Brailer all presenting. It's clear that Medicare is very interested in adopting pay-for-performance, with a little more money included for hospital quality reporting in the most recent budget.

Measuring P4P in the …

Colorado-based HealthGrades released its fourth annual report on hospital quality, a document that includes a list of about 300 hospitals the company recognizes for clinical excellence. Expect local media coverage to stress the new ratings as usual. Based on government Medicare data, the report echoes a finding that most people in healthcare already are well aware of: If you're a patient, your chances of surviving your hospital stay are much higher if you stick with a hospital in the top …

Pay-for-performance (P4P) is the latest panacea that's supposed to overcome the cost problem, improve quality and remove practice variation. Medicare has leapt on this bandwagon, following the examples of pilots in California and Massachusetts. It's already rewarding hospitals (albeit only a tiny amount) for reporting quality information. This year we'll see the impact a full year of reporting has had on hospital quality. A similar program for nursing homes has had good success so …

HealthGrades has released its annual Hospital Quality in America Study. The for-profit company bases its ratings on Medicare data, assigning hospitals one star (poor), three star (as expected) and five star (best) quality ratings across 18 procedures and diagnoses. The study examines performance over a three-year period from 2002 to 2004. Ratings are available online at the HealthGrades Web site. Researchers note that the five star hospitals are generally hospitals with …