An Obamacare program intended to improve quality of care by rewarding medical providers failed in its first year, according to Vox.
Sarah Kliff reports:
The program is called Hospital Value Based Purchasing, and its meant to reward hospitals that do really well at 20 metrics, including things like responding quickly to heart attacks and giving patients discharge instructions when they leave the hospitals.
Beginning in 2011, hospitals stood to lose as much as 1 percent of their Medicare revenue if they did badly at these measures — or earn an additional 1 percent if they outperformed their competitors.
This put a total of $1.1 billion at risk for hospitals, who could either earn part of that pool of funds by doing really well — or end up paying into it when they didn't hit the right targets.
The aim of the penalty and reward system was to encourage all hospitals to improve the care they deliver. That might not have happened.
Andrew Ryan, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College, applied the same quality metrics to participating and non-participating hospitals and "found no difference," according to the report.
"We found that the timing of the hospital value-based purchasing system wasn't associated with any additional improvement," Ryan said. "We would have hoped to have seen more responsiveness."