Home Health & Hospice Week

A successful Medicare demonstration project may put home care providers one step closer to a pay-for-performance system as well. A five-year P4P demonstration among physician practices has shown positive results, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a release. The demo involving 10 physician groups and 32 performance measures made "significant progress in areas of both quality improvement and savings in Medicare expenditures," CMS says. In the first year of the demo, only two physician groups achieved "benchmark performance" on all the measures. In year five, seven groups did; the rest did so for 30 of the measures, CMS says. Four of the groups will share nearly $30 million in incentive payments under the demo.