Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

CMS may need to go back to the drawing board for your quality measures, study says.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began reporting hospitals' performance measures on its Hospital Compare Web site in an effort to improve quality of care in hospitals. But the quality-of-care measures that hospitals have reported on the Web site have had little impact on hospital-level outcomes, a new study claims.

Researchers studied 3,657 acute care hospitals based on performance data they reported on Hospital Compare. The results appear in a report in the Dec. 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Specifically, researchers compared the hospitals' risk-adjusted mortality rates with the quality-of-care data the hospitals reported on CMS' site. The study looked at condition-specific inpatient, 30-day and one-year risk-adjusted mortality rates in these hospitals.

Hospital quality-of-care measures predicted only "small differences" in risk-adjusted mortality rates, the researchers find. "Efforts should be made to develop performance measures that are tightly linked to patient outcomes," they conclude.

To view an abstract of the study in JAMA, go to http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/296/22/2694.