Value Based Purchasing (VBP) is here.
VBP is a control scheme introduced by CMS to reduce the cost of health care. Under VBP, providers will be reimbursed for care given to Medicare patients based on patient satisfaction and the ability to get good scores on CMS core measures.
Medicare has been very clear about the impact to hospital bottom lines.
Average performers won't break even.
If you have average core measures, and average patient satisfaction your institution will lose money.
The way to maximize your reimbursement and protect your budget is to have high performance compared to national benchmarks with other hospitals across the country, and to make dramatic improvement against your own baseline scores. Either way, you must improve.
If you add the reduced reimbursements to an additional 20.4 million Medicare patients over the next decade, and then add the effect of productivity adjustments, 15 percent more institutional providers will go bankrupt by 2019, according to the former administrator of CMS.
You must be better than average, or you will be worse off financially next year.
But how to get better?
If you are depending on individual clinicians to spectacularly rise to the challenge on their own, you will fail. Sustained results, like this hospital achieved, will only come from a systems approach that hard-wires daily habits all of personnel. If you don't know how to do this, it might be time to get some help.