WASHINGTON – More than 2,200 hospitals – members of the Premier healthcare alliance – urged President Barack Obama last Friday to include pay for performance as part of a health reform plan.
The San Diego-based network has more than 700 hospitals participating in a repository of hospital clinical and financial information and is one of the largest healthcare purchasing networks in the country. According to Susan DeVore, Premier's president and author of the letter sent last week to Obama, this puts Premier in a unique position to understand the challenges related to health reform.
DeVore said Premier supports aligning payment with quality and increasing the transparency in healthcare.
"Premier strongly supports policies that link payment to quality outcomes and urges you to include in healthcare reform a well-designed Medicare hospital value-based purchasing program that will reward quality and incentivize improved patient care," she wrote.
The letter advised Obama to create a value-based purchasing incentive program for hospitals "designed to promote quality improvement rather than to guarantee government savings."
The government should share demonstrated Medicare savings from a value-based purchasing, or P4P, programs with hospitals, she said, and provide technical assistance to lower-performing hospitals serving vulnerable populations or hospitals with limited financial resources.
Premier also endorsed rewards for hospitals that reduce readmissions, the bundling of acute and post-acute payments and the development of voluntary accountable care organizations.
DeVore said Premier shares Obama's goal to ensure that patients are better informed on the quality and cost of their healthcare, and she urged the president to continue support for evidence-based medicine.
"We believe these reforms, if done right, will move us toward an efficient, outcomes-oriented and patient-centered healthcare delivery system," DeVore said.
