In the June 15, 2017 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Andrew Ryan and colleagues from the University of Michigan published an evaluation of the Medicare Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program (HVBP).
To summarize, if you offer a 1% incentive, and then dilute it by offering it only for the 40% of hospital patients covered by Medicare, and then dilute it further by spreading it across three domains (clinical process quality, patient experience and mortality), and then dilute each of these by basing them on multiple component metrics, and then dilute it more by choosing metrics that have already been reported for a number of years (and therefore the “low hanging fruit” improvement opportunities may already have been picked), and then further dilute it by offering the incentive mixed in with many other incentives for such things as meaningful use of EMRs…..
