Rewarding patient experience improvement in VBP helps hospitals serving minority patients

While hospitals in the Medicare Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program receive patient experience points based on achievement, improvement and consistency, additional emphasis on improvement points could benefit hospitals serving minority patients, according to a study reported this week in Health Affairs. The authors examined how the three components affected reimbursement for 3,152 hospitals in 2015, including their impact on low-performing and high-minority hospitals. Although the achievement component had the biggest influence on payments, payments related to improvement and consistency were more beneficial for low-performing hospitals that disproportionately served minority patients. “The findings highlight the important inducement that paying for improvement provides to initially low-performing hospitals to improve care and the role this incentive structure plays in minimizing resource redistributions away from hospitals serving minority populations,” the authors said.