Five initiatives: Medicare experiments with paying for quality.(Practice Trends)

WASHINGTON -- Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are so determined to encourage quality care that they're willing to pay for it.

Medicare currently has five initiatives that offer some type of "pay for performance" incentives to hospitals and physician groups, said Mark Wynn, Ph.D., director of the division of payment policy demonstration in the office of research, development, and information at CMS.

"CMS is increasingly concerned and interested in focusing on quality," Dr. Wynn said at the annual National Managed Health Care Congress.

The pay-for-performance project is part of its Hospital Quality Incentive Demon-stration (HQID) with Premier Inc., a nationwide organization of not-for-profit hospitals.

The project uses 34 measures for five clinical conditions--acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, community acquired pneumonia, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), and hip and knee replacement.

Bonuses will be given to the top hospitals for each of the five conditions. The top 10% will receive a 2% bonus of their Medicare payments for that condition and the second 10% will get a 1% bonus.

And the top half of hospitals in each clinical area will be publicly acknowledged on the CMS Web site.