The rate of improvements in patient experience has slowed since the implementation of the program. | File image
Tabitha Fleming | Jan 26, 2017

AMA argues value-based purchasing isn't benefiting patients

The Value-Based Purchasing Program that Medicare uses isn’t actually doing anything to improve patient experiences, the American Hospital Association reported recently.

The Value-Based Purchasing Program is a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services initiative that rewards acute-care hospitals with incentive payments for the quality of care they provide to Medicare beneficiaries. While the program was designed to increase the quality of care that patients experience, the program may actually be doing the opposite and halting the improvements that it was designed to encourage.

  

The study, which examined trends in various patient satisfaction between 2008 and 2014, used data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that included publicly available patient-reported experiences through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems in 2008. Medicare payments were tied directly to the reported results through the implementation of the Value-Based Purchasing program in 2011.

The influence of the program was first reported in the weekly edition of Health Affairs. Overall, the data was processed and researchers found that the rate of improvements in patient experience has slowed since the implementation of the program.

“Over the entire study period, certain subsets of hospitals (such as small ones) seemed to have improved in patient experience more than other subsets (such as larger hospitals), yet even for the institutions that had greater improvement, the majority of the change occurred before the implementation of the VBP program,” the authors wrote.

This study may add to a “growing body of literature suggesting that U.S. pay-for performance schemes have had little to no effect on driving meaningful improvements in other patient outcomes,” the study concluded.

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