Oral

The Department of Health and Human Services recently launched a new initiative, authorized by the Affordable Care Act, to reward hospitals for the quality of care they provide to Medicare patients. The purpose of this new initiative, called “Value-Based Purchasing (VBP)”, is to help improve the quality, safety and affordability of health care in the US. This session will explain VBP, how hospitals will be scored and how hospitals will be able to use VBP to monitor and improve the quality of the care they provide to their patients. The authors in this session will present 1.) a case study of a specific hospital’s efforts to identify improvement opportunities, 2.) a study of VBP scores for 3,211 acute care hospitals and how these scores vary by hospital characteristics, 3.) A cluster analysis of VBP scores to demonstrate how hospitals can design more focused and effective quality improvement interventions, and 4.) An assessment of Coefficient of Variation (CV) of measure-level scores to identify quality measures with low mean scores and high variance in order to target areas in most need of interventions to improve quality of care.

Session Objectives: 1.) Define “Value-Based Purchasing (VBP)” 2.) Demonstrate how VBP will affect hospital reimbursement when it is introduced in 2013. 3.) Identify at least three methods that hospitals will be able to use to monitor and improve hospital performance