News: Hospitals lose out in CMS' carrot/stick prodding

Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing ties reimbursement to quality measures, assessing criteria such as mortality, patient satisfaction, and other items. To over simplify, if hospitals do a good job they receive additional funding; if they don’t do that great, they lose funding. Although 55% earned higher payments for their VBP efforts, less than half of them actually received more money due to penalties associated with other related quality payment programs, according to a Kaiser Health News report.

CMS penalized more than 700 hospitals for hospital acquired conditions, for an estimated $373 million, Kaiser Health News reported in December 2014.In October 2014, Kaiser Health Newsreported that three-quarters of hospitals subject to the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program were penalized resulting in fines/payment reductions of about $428 million.