MedPAC: Overhaul Medicare Quality Programs
Medicare would implement major changes in its hospital quality programs under a proposal approved by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Fierce Healthcare reports that the proposal adopted by MedPAC for recommendation to Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services …would essentially lump together several existing programs that measure quality—the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program and the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program—into the Hospital Value Incentive Program (HVIP). It would also eliminate the existing Inpatient Quality Reporting Program. Under the MedPAC proposal, Performance across five domains—readmissions, mortality, spending, patient experience and hospital-acquired conditions—would be converted to HVIP “points.” Those points would be [...]