About 1 in 5 healthcare payments is tied to value-based model

Dive Brief:

• Value-based care and other healthcare quality initiatives have made inroads, with an estimated 4% annual growth in value-based payments and 7% average annual increase in hospitals and clinicians participating in major clinical registries, a new Q-Centrix report shows.
• The consultancy’s report looks at participation in quality programs and resource needs in three key quality reporting areas: regulatory, infection prevention and clinical registries.
• The report estimates value-based payments make up about 22% of all care delivery payments as of the start of this year, up from 18% at the beginning of 2018. Meanwhile, the share of hospitals submitting data to the top 20 inpatient clinical registries is expected to climb from 18,432 in 2017 to 23,773 in 2021.

Dive Insight:

Providers continue to determine the best ways to report clinical and quality data to improve value-based care and population health efforts.

According to the report, four of the top five most-participated in registries in 2017 related to cardiovascular disease, while the fifth focused on cancer.

Other findings in the report include:

• The number of state registries continues to grow, with 23 active programs in eight states.
• The average time to abstract health record data for reporting to registries that have transitioned to newer versions of their data collection forms rose 19% in the past two years.
• Some registries are ramping up data collection requirements, making participation more difficult at a time when hospital spending on registry abstraction services is rising.

“Not only can we anticipate an increase in quality program participation, we can expect it to grow faster than previously thought,” Q-Centrix CEO Milton Silva-Craig said in a statement. “Looking at all these factors together, the increasing need for new and more-efficient approaches to quality reporting becomes utterly apparent. Our impression is when hospitals are able to streamline their quality reporting processes, that’s when they have the best chance of getting and staying ahead of their quality reporting demands.”

The four top reported electronic clinical quality measures pertained to emergency department arrival and department times, care of patients with venous thromboembolism, care for stroke patients and and perinatal care.

The report also points to a potential shortage of infection preventionists, noting 750 hospitals had Medicare payments reduced due to hospital-acquired infection rates. Q-Centrix estimates 5,400 IPs may be necessary to meet current need. 

The five most used infection prevention screening platforms were surveillance, pharmacy, multidrug resistant organisms, surgical procedures and antimicrobial stewardship.