“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.
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