The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on June 17 that it will award incentive payments of more than $7 million to 112 top-performing hospitals in the third year of the CMS/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project. Through the project’s first three years, CMS has awarded more than $24.5 million to top performers.
According to the results released June 17, more than 250 hospitals participating in the project have raised overall quality by an average of 15.8 percent over three years based on their delivery of 30 nationally standardized and widely accepted care measures to patients in five clinical areas. And 15 hospitals moved from “worst to first” rankings, moving from the bottom to the top fifth of hospitals in one or more clinical areas. These hospitals improved by an average 32.6 percentage points in quality scores over three years.
Improvements in quality of care saved the lives of an estimated 2,500 heart attack patients across the first three years of the project, according to an analysis of mortality rates at participating hospitals. Patients also received approximately 300,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures, such as smoking cessation, discharge instructions, and pneumococcal vaccination, during that same timeframe. Read the press release.
