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CHA DataSuite has issued hospital-specific analyses for critical access hospitals (CAHs) based on the rules for the Medicare value-based purchasing (VBP) program for inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) hospitals.
Under the Affordable Care Act, CAHs are excluded from the mandatory VBP program that began for IPPS hospitals in 2013. However, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is required to develop a VBP demonstration program for CAHs. The demonstration program likely will lead to the eventual adoption of a mandatory VBP program for CAHs.
The analysis is intended to provide CAHs with an estimate of their performance potential under a scenario for the CAH VBP program that closely resembles the one currently in place for IPPS hospitals. It estimates VBP scores and impacts for CAHs, and provides full details on how the points and scores for each quality measure and quality domain are calculated.
The analysis is not a representation of the VBP demonstration program that the Secretary will eventually develop for CAHs, which has not yet been proposed. CHA has no indication that the assumptions made for this analysis will be the methodology that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will adopt, and the impacts provided in the analysis should not be used for budgeting purposes. However, the resulting composite VBP scores are intended to provide a good indication of the relative quality performance for CAHs when compared to their peers.
More information is available in the analysis description.
