Hospitals will be required to publicly report certain quality measures related to outpatient care, such as antibiotic protocols for surgical patients, beginning in June 2010 or face a potential 2% reduction in Medicare payments.
The new requirement, outlined in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' 2010 outpatient prospective payment system final rule, comes 2 years after CMS initiated the voluntary Hospital Outpatient Quality Data Reporting Program, which focused on 11 outpatient care quality measures. Starting next year, hospitals will be required to report those measures publicly on CMS' Hospital Compare Web site.
Hospitals currently report on 28 process measures, including heart attack and heart failure, surgical improvement and pneumonia, that are published on Hospital Compare. Nancy Foster, the American Hospital Association's vice president of quality and patient safety, says CMS and the Hospital Quality Alliance always intended to add outpatient measures and "have been testing with various focus groups how to effectively portray this information" on the site.
Irene Tsikitas
