Pay for Performance:
3 Of 4 P4P Demo Regions See Savings
Published on Tue Mar 23, 2010
Agencies in non-savings area 'disappointed' to miss out on program rewards. Lots of home health agencies in the pay for performance demonstration improved their outcome scores or scored highly, but that wasn't enough to net them a payout from the program's first year. Under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' P4P demonstration project that ran in 2007 and 2008 and included 567 HHAs, top performing and top improving agencies receive P4P bonus payments only if Medicare expenditures overall for patients in the intervention group are less than expenditures for a control group. The time period considered included the home health episode plus 30 days. Upon calculating those payments for the demo's first year, CMS found that only three of the four P4P regions saw such overall savings, CMS's Jim Coan explained in an April 12 session at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's March on Washington meeting. [...]