News
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Alven Weil
Premier Inc.
704.733.5797
Hospital quality improving, cost, mortality rate trends declining for participants in Medicare pay-for-performance project
Premier healthcare alliance analysis finds tens of thousands of lives could
be saved, hospital costs could be reduced by $4.5 billion;
Analysis broadest of its kind to date
CHARLOTTE, NC (January 31, 2008) – Hospital quality continues to improve while patient mortality rates and hospital costs are declining among participants in a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) pay-for-performance (P4P) demonstration project, according to a recent analysis by the Premier healthcare alliance.
According to the analysis, the broadest of its kind, of 1.1 million patient records from participating Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) hospitals, if all hospitals nationally were to achieve the three-year cost and mortality improvements found among the HQID project participants for pneumonia, heart bypass, heart failure, heart attack (acute myocardial infarction), and hip and knee replacement patient populations, they could save an estimated 70,000 lives per year and reduce hospital costs by more than $4.5 billion annually. The 1.1 million patient records represented in this analysis encompass 8.5 percent of all patients nationally within the five noted clinical areas over the three-year timeline of this analysis.
"Our work with hundreds of hospitals across the nation provides evidence of how the U.S. healthcare system is showing improvements and patients are getting higher quality healthcare," said Richard Norling, president and chief executive officer of Premier. "The findings from this analysis clearly suggest that, through the reliable delivery of basic care processes, improving clinical quality and safely reducing costs is attainable for all hospitals across the country."
On average, the median hospital cost per patient for participants in the CMS, Premier HQID project declined by over $1,000 across the first three years of the project, whereas the median mortality rate decreased by 1.87 percent.
"Our experiences with this pay-for-performance demonstration have provided us with invaluable guidance as we continue to pursue and develop value-based purchasing incentives," said Kerry Weems, acting administrator for CMS.
CMS, Premier HQID Project
The analysis is based on data from hospitals in the CMS, Premier HQID project. Through that project, which has been extended by CMS for an additional three years (through 2009), Premier collects a set of more than 30 evidence-based clinical quality measures from over 250 hospitals across the country. The quality measures were developed by government and private organizations (for more information on the indicators, go to:
www.qualitydemo.com).
For hospitals participating in the HQID project, the median Composite Quality Score (CQS), a combination of clinical quality measures and outcome measures, improved by an average of 17.3 percent across all clinical areas between the inception of the program in October 2003 through June 2007 (15 quarters*).
The median Appropriate Care Score (ACS), also referred to as "perfect process score," to designate when a patient receives all possible care measures within a clinical area, improved by an average of 52.6 percent across all clinical areas between the inception of the program in October 2003 through June 2007 (15 quarters*).
When compared to non-participating hospitals, the quality score of hospitals in the HQID project on 19 publicly reported quality indicators is 6.5 percent higher, indicating that performance incentives are effective at improving quality of care. HQID hospitals did not have higher quality ratings overall at the beginning of the project.
"We have learned from the HQID project that financial incentives, coupled with public reporting of performance on nationally recognized evidence-based quality and outcomes measures, substantially improve the reliability and quality of patient care," said Stephanie Alexander, senior vice president and general manager of Premier Healthcare Informatics. "The findings from this analysis provide evidence that improvements in quality do lead to reduction in costs."
A recent New England Journal of Medicine study found that hospitals in the HQID project achieved better quality patient care than those hospitals participating in Hospital Compare – a Health and Human Services-led hospital quality improvement initiative without financial incentives.
"Our analysis supports the improvements in quality observed in the Premier study sustaining the role of pay-for-performance to improve hospital quality," said Evan Benjamin, MD, FACP, chief quality officer, Baystate Health in Springfield, Mass., and associate professor of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine. "Financial incentives may be helpful at changing hospital behavior to accelerate quality improvement."
*Preliminary HQID Year 3 and Year 4 data.
About Premier Inc., 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
The Premier healthcare alliance is more
than 2,300 U.S. hospitals and 64,000-plus other healthcare sites working
together to improve healthcare quality and affordability. Owned by
not-for-profit hospitals, Premier maintains the
nation's most comprehensive repository of clinical, financial and outcomes
information and operates a leading healthcare purchasing network. A world leader
in helping deliver measurable improvements in care, Premier works with the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the United Kingdom's National
Health Service North West to improve hospital performance. Headquartered in
Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has offices
in San Diego, Philadelphia and Washington. Follow Premier on
Twitter.