An early look at performance on the emergency care measures included in Medicare's hospital inpatient Value-Based Purchasing Program.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: Medicare's new, mandatory Hospital Inpatient Value-Based Purchasing Program introduces financial rewards or penalties to hospitals according to achievement or improvement on several publicly reported quality measures. Our objective was to describe hospital reporting on the 4 emergency department (ED)-related program measures, variation in performance on the ED measures across hospital characteristics, and the characteristics of hospitals that were more likely to receive performance scores based on improvement versus achievement.

METHODS: This was an exploratory, descriptive analysis. We merged 2008 to 2010 performance data from Hospital Compare with the 2009 American Hospital Association Annual Survey. We calculated a composite score for the 4 ED measures and used Kruskal-Wallis tests to examine differences in performance across hospital characteristics. We also examined differences in the percentage of scores that were awarded according to improvement versus achievement.

RESULTS: There were 2,927 hospitals that qualified for the value-based purchasing program and were included in the analysis. For-profit hospitals received the highest scores; public hospitals and hospitals lacking The Joint Commission (TJC) accreditation received the lowest scores. Public hospitals had the largest share of scores awarded according to improvement (39.8%); for-profit hospitals had the lowest (27.8%).

CONCLUSION: We found variation in performance by hospital characteristics on the ED-related program measures. Although public and non-TJC-accredited hospitals trailed in performance, they showed strong signs of improvement, signaling that performance gaps by ownership and accreditation may decrease. Considering the increasing scope of the value-based purchasing program, ED leaders should monitor both achievement and improvement on the 4 ED-related program measures.