Industry Insights

Many participants on today’s Technical Assistance Conference Call were surprised to hear the change to the payment calculation that will now be required for the bundled pricing proposal.

One after another, the “next new ideas” in healthcare seem to be failing.  This time it’s the potential to reduce readmissions that the New England Journal of Medicine takes to task. Despite CMS’s focus on incentivizing hospitals to reduce their readmission rates (by including them in bundled payment budgets) and penalizing those hospital

This week the New England Journal of Medicine published an article concluding that yet another Medicare experiment in cost or quality control was ineffective.  This article described the Medicare Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration, in which hospitals could receive an increase in their Medicare payments for meeting certain quality metrics.  The article did not describe the payments that were made to the participating hospitals, but presumably some hospitals scored well on the quality metr