CHARLOTTE, NC – A pay-for-performance project has resulted in a 15.8 percent boost in quality over three years at 250 hospitals across the country, the Premier healthcare alliance reported Tuesday. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services awarded nearly $25 million under the joint initiative with Premier.

CMS awarded incentive payments of more than $7 million to 112 top-performing hospitals in Year 3.

For the third year of the program, Sacred Heart Medical Center, in Spokane, Wash., received the highest quality incentive payment of $385,342 for achieving top performance in four of the five clinical areas.  

The project, which ran from 2003-2006, has been extended by CMS for an additional three years through September 2009.

Improvements in quality of care saved the lives of an estimated 2,500 heart attack patients across the first three years of the project, according to an analysis of mortality rates at hospitals participating in the project. Patients also received approximately 300,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures, such as smoking cessation, discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination, during that time.

Hospitals participating in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration - HQID - included small and large, urban and rural, teaching and non-teaching facilities in 36 states. The hospitals volunteered to report their quality data for five high-volume inpatient conditions using national measures of quality care.