The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has approved a three-year extension of its pay-for-performance demonstration project involving more than 250 hospitals. The recently released second-year results of the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration showed substantial improvement in quality of care across five clinical focus areas, with total gains over the first two years of 11.8 percentage points, according to CMS.
During the extension of the program, CMS will test new incentive models and develop new ways to measure quality. Until now, only top-performing hospitals have been eligible for incentive payments. The extension will test the effectiveness of offering incentive payments to hospitals achieving a defined level of quality, or quality threshold, and to hospitals achieving the greatest improvement in quality that also achieve the quality threshold. The extension will continue to track hospital performance in the five identified clinical focus areas, although additional quality measures and clinical conditions, such as mortality and patient safety measures, may be included in the fifth and sixth years.
