Readmission Penalties Begin This Month

CMS announced an incentive-based initiative earlier this year, which would punish hospitals that fail to meet new quality-of-care guidelines. Hospitals that exceeded these guidelines would receive bonuses, while those that failed to meet guidelines would receive financial penalties.

Under the final rules announced Friday, Medicare will cut payments to hospitals 1 percent and set that money aside for a bonus pool. Hospitals that do better than average on a variety of measurements, or show the greatest improvement from the previous year, would earn bonus payments, totaling $850 million in the first year. The bonus pool would increase to 2 percent of Medicare payments in October 2016.

“In many ways, it’s a watershed moment for the health care system,” said Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who has studied hospital quality. “It’s a modest amount of money and not something that’s going to radically change the way we pay for hospital care in America. But it’s a really important step toward paying for better care and not just for more care.”

Kaiser Health has written an article explaining the penalties in greater detail, and explaining who is most at risk.

The penalties, authorized by the 2010 health care law, are part of a multipronged effort by Medicare to use its financial muscle to force improvements in hospital quality. In a few months, hospitals also will be penalized or rewarded based on how well they adhere to basic standards of care and how patients rated their experiences. Overall, Medicare has decided to penalize 71 percent of the hospitals whose readmission rates it evaluated, the records show.

The penalties will fall heaviest on hospitals in New Jersey, New York, the District of Columbia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Illinois and Massachusetts, a Kaiser Health News analysis of the records shows.  Hospitals that treat the most low-income patients will be hit particularly hard.

A total of 307 hospitals nationally will lose the maximum amount allowed under the health care law: 1 percent of their base Medicare reimbursements. Several of those are top-ranked institutions, including Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.

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Pam Argeris is a thought leader in the Healthcare Industry and possesses extensive, hands-on experience with CMS compliance, and multiple regulatory bodies such as NCQA, JACHO, and DOI. In her role at Merrill Corp., Pam focuses on developing solutions for compliance and quality assurance, delivered in a cost effective manner to improve beneficiary and prospect communications. You can contact Pam at Pamela.Argeris@merrillcorp.com.