performance program news from FierceHealthcare
News
Group of hospitals joins BC of CA P4P program
A group of 23 hospitals have joined Blue Cross of California's new inpatient pay-for-performance program, which is structured to give the facilities adjustments to their inpatient fixed-payment... Read more...
CMS program would base hospital pay on performance
CMS is proposing a new quality-reporting program which would cut Medicare payments to hospitals, but give money back if the hospitals performed well on the agency's quality measures. The new... Read more...
Medicare plans home health P4P program
CMS has begun looking for home health agencies to participate in a new pay-for-performance program which will look at whether the agencies can simultaneously improve care and cut costs for Medicare.... Read more...
Senate prods CMS on value-based purchasing, SCHIP
Senate leaders are pushing to get a pending report from CMS regarding hospital value-based purchasing and another on the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana) and... Read more...
Blue Cross of California pays $31M in P4P bonuses
It's another prosperous year for a select group of medical practices and IPAs, that are getting $31 million in pay-for-performance bonuses this year from Blue Cross of California. This follows a 2006... Read more...
SPOTLIGHT: IT helps groups improve P4P performance
IT investment programs may seem nice to have, rather than necessary, to many non-technical managers. But that could turn out to be a short-sighted view. According to a new study, the more California... Read more...
BCBS of MA begins physician analysis program
Working with an outside information technology vendor, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has begun a program designed to identify patients whose care isn't meeting clinical guidelines. The vendor, MDdatacor, will analyze data from EMRs, transcribed office notes, lab results, and cross-reference that with the plan's pharmacy and claims data. BCBS plans to use the analysis as part of its pay-for-performance program. BCBS will begin by offering the tools to a subset of its physicians, …
... Read more...Bill would open Medicare data to research
A bill making the rounds in the U.S. Senate would open up Medicare data to private organizations that want to use it for research and analysis. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Judd Gregg (R-NJ), would make claims, enrollment, survey, assessment and other available to private groups hoping to measure care quality, efficiency and effectiveness. Other stakeholders would then have the right to request reports from the research organizations. The research organizations …
... Read more...Study:Medicare P4P doesn't boost hospital quality
While Medicare's new pay-for-performance program may have some effect on hospital quality, the financial incentives don't have any bigger impact than a hospital's voluntary improvement efforts, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, which looked at data from 54 hospitals in the Medicare P4P program, found that most improved on some important criteria during the test, for example by prescribing aspirin more frequently for …
... Read more...Physicians question CMS P4P effort
Though it hasn't started yet, physicians are already questioning whether CMS's pay-for-performance program will work over the long term. Physician critics say that many practices won't have the time, resources or staff to begin quality reporting. To get the 1.5 percent bonus, physicians will be asked to report on 74 measures for claims between July 1st and December 31st. To make this happen, it's likely that the practices will have to upgrade their IT infrastructure, a step which can be …
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