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CMS/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID)

Model hospital value-based purchasing program improved patient outcomes

Hospitals participating in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Premier healthcare alliance Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) value-based purchasing project raised their overall quality by an average of 18.6 percent over six years based on their delivery of more than 30 nationally standardized and widely accepted care measures to patients in the six clinical areas.

These improvements saved the lives of an estimated 8,500 heart attack patients in five years, according to a Premier analysis of mortality rates at hospitals participating in the project. The more than 2.7 million patients treated in the six clinical areas at the 216 participating hospitals also received approximately 962,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures, such as smoking cessation, discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination, during that same time frame.

Additional research by Premier using the Hospital Compare dataset showed that, by September 2009, HQID participants scored on average 5.44 percentage points higher (95.64 percent to 90.2 percent) than non-participants on 25 performance measures used by Hospital Compare, the government's scorecard for hospital quality.

New payment model helps drive additional improvements

CMS extended the project for three additional years through September 2009 to test the effectiveness of new incentive models and ways to improve patient care. Beginning with year 4 results, participants are eligible to receive the following awards:

  1. Top Performance Award – The top 20 percent of hospitals in each clinical area will receive an additional incentive payment. This group will receive the Attainment Award as well.
  2. Improvement Award – Hospitals that attain median level performance and are among the top 20 percent of hospitals with the largest percentage quality improvements in each clinical area will receive an additional incentive payment.
  3. Attainment Award – Hospitals that attain or exceed the median level composite quality score (CQS) benchmark from two years prior will receive an incentive payment.

The new payment model has shown to promote increased quality improvements in the project. Eighteen hospitals moved from the bottom to the top 20 percent of hospitals in one or more clinical areas, improving quality scores by an average 29.2 percentage points over six years.

Overall, under the project extension's new reimbursement model, CMS announced that it will award incentive payments of almost $12 million in the final year 6 to 211 providers for top performance, as well as top improvement and for reaching a level of attainment, in the project's six clinical areas. Through all six years of the project CMS has awarded more than $60 million to top providers.


Results from year 6 (November 2011):

HQID year 6 spanned the time frame of Q4 2008 through Q3 2009.

Results from year 5 (September 2010):

HQID year 5 spanned the time frame of Q4 2007 through Q3 2008.

Results from year 4 (August 2009):

HQID year 4 spanned the time frame of Q4 2006 through Q3 2007.

Results from year 3 (June 2008):

HQID year 3 spanned the time frame of Q4 2005 through Q3 2006.

Results from year 2 (January 2007):

HQID year 2 spanned the time frame of Q4 2004 through Q3 2005.

Results from year 1:

HQID year 1 spanned the time frame of Q4 2003 through Q3 2004.

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