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More execs being measured for population-health metrics

 

A small but growing number of hospital systems, among them Trinity Health System, America’s fifth biggest and based in Steubenville, Ohio, are linking executive  pay to population-health measures.As a Modern Healthcare article notes, “{T}he group is sure to expand as more health systems gravitate toward emerging value-based models and risk contracts that require hospitals to care for entire populations of people long after they leave the hospital.”

“Since Medicare began reimbursing providers based on quality and dinging them for poor performance in quality measures in programs like Medicare shared savings and value-based purchasing, providers have had to shift their focus to keeping people healthy long-term, rather than treating them only when sick. There’s ample empirical evidence that incentives drive behavior, so it made sense for hospital boards to prod leadership toward quality by putting part of their paychecks at risk.”

”Today, hospital executive compensation incentives are a mix of financial, quality, patient satisfaction and, increasingly, population health measures. Executive compensation experts say the weight is shifting toward the quality portion. Nearly all large health systems incentivize their executives based on cost, and 90 percent include quality measures, like hospital-acquired infections and readmission rates, in their annual plans, according to data from executive compensation firm Sullivan, Cotter and Associates,” Modern Healthcare reported.

But this will be difficult, given that it’s tougher to measure quality, with the subjectivity involved, than to  foll0w the metrics in old-fashioned fee-for-service medicine, especially if patient data from all appropriate providers aren’t  properly integrated in a health system.

To read the article please hit this link.

 

 


Don’t skimp on RCM systems

 

Even financially struggling hospitals need to update their revenue-cycle-management systems in order to work with multi-provider bundles, shared savings or other complex payment models.

Jay Sultan, principal strategy adviser at Edifecs, a health IT company, told Becker’s Hospital Review that using  antiquated RCM systems to add the new data sources and analytics needed to validate inbound revenue is like “trying to deliver the functionality of a modern EHR using a typewriter.”

“Payment reform is driving CMS, Medicaid and commercial payers to alter the revenue cycle, with a larger portion of provider revenue driven by performance elements outside of a traditional RCM system’s capability,” he added.

He told the news service that hospitals should prioritize technology investments based on bottom-line projections. In some hospitals,  he said, “current RCM technology and the processes that it drives are so antiquated that maintaining the system costs more than the revenue assurance/enhancement it delivers.”

 

 


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