Medicare will reward more hospitals than it will penalize in fiscal 2016 under its value-based purchasing program, the CMS said Monday.
About 1,800 hospitals will see positive payment adjustments the CMS said. The changes in base DRG payments will be very small—between -0.4% and 0.4%, for about half of the more than 3,000 hospitals that are subject to the program.
Under the value-based purchasing program, the CMS imposed an across-the-board 1.75% reduction in Medicare payments (up from 1.5% for fiscal 2015) for most inpatient acute-care hospitals. The reduction created a budget-neutral bonus pool of about $1.5 billion to reward hospitals that perform well on certain metrics and patient surveys. The hospitals that performed the worst won't see any of the reduction restored.
Nearly 160 more hospitals will see positive adjustments in fiscal 2016 than in fiscal 2015, according to a Modern Healthcare analysis of CMS data. Also, 475 hospitals managed to swing from a penalty to bonus, while 317 moved from positive to negative territory.
