Measures to Assess Hospital Quality Are Flawed, Study Finds

approach for assessing hospital penalties under the

Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program might need to be reconsidered in order to achieve the intended goal of the program, according to findings published in JAMA.

relationship between the hospital quality summary score and HAC program penalization as well as publicly reported process-of-care and outcome measures from 4 clinical areas: surgery, acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia.

The findings of the study showed hospitals were more likely to be penalized if they had accreditations, offered advanced services, were major teaching institutions or performed better on other quality measures.

reduces payments to the lowest-performing hospitals, and researchers examined the

The HAC Reduction Program

The

“Higher-performing hospitals were penalized more because some of the measures that CMS uses to assess quality are flawed,” senior author Karl Bilimoria, MD, assistant professor in surgery-surgical oncology and director of the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center, said in a statement. “The measures paradoxically identify high-performing hospitals as poor performers. Clearly this is not ideal for hospitals or for patients.”

ospitals with the highest quality score of 8 were penalized significantly more frequently than hospitals with the lowest quality score of 0.

Nearly one-fourth (22%) of participating hospitals were penalized and h

See the study: http://bit.ly/1PfhkJH