Methodist Medical Center has been awarded for attainment in five clinical areas in a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Premier Healthcare Alliance value based purchasing project that rewards hospitals for delivering high quality care. The five categories include (Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI), Heart Failure, Pneumonia, Hip and Knee and Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG). Due to its successes, Methodist will receive a bonus payment from CMS, which awarded incentive payments of approximately $12 million to 225 hospitals.
This is the fourth consecutive year that Methodist has been recognized for this quality performance. CMS has awarded more than $36.5 to hospitals receiving top performance recognition over the first four years of the project.
“Providing outstanding patient care has always been our primary mission,” said Michael Bryant, President and CEO of Methodist. “Our successes in this project are a testament to our ongoing efforts to improvement the quality of care we offer our patients.”
“The successes of the hospitals – small and large, urban and rural, teaching and non-teaching – in the HQID project have led to its consideration as the basis for key national health reforms,” said Susan DeVore, Premier president and CEO. “As the proposal of a national value-based purchasing program becomes a reality, hospitals participating in HQID will have six years experience with such a model.”
About the HQID project – The HQID is the first national project of its kind, designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. Through the project, which has been extended by CMS for an additional three years, Premier collects a set of more than 30 evidence-based clinical quality measures from almost 250 hospitals across the country. The quality measures were developed by government and private organizations (for more information on the indicators, visit: www.qualitydemo.com).
HQID tracks process and outcome measures in five clinical areas – acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), pneumonia, and hip and knee replacement.
Improvements in quality of care saved an estimated 4,700 acute myocardial infarction (AMI/heart attack) patients across the first four years of the project, according to an analysis of mortality rates at hospitals participating in the project. In addition, patients received approximately 500,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures, such as smoking cessation, discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination, during that same timeframe.
For hospitals participating in the HQID project, the average Composite Quality Score (CQS), an aggregate of all quality measures within each clinical area, improved by 2.2 percent between the project’s third and fourth year for total gains of 17.2 percent over the project’s first four years.
Additional research by Premier using the Hospital Compare dataset showed that, by March 2008, HQID participants scored on average 6.9 percentage points higher (94.64 percent to 87.36 percent) than non-participants when evaluating 19 common Hospital Compare measures.