Using TapRooT® to Prevent Medicare Payment Reductions

Medicare has introduced several programs that attempt to link quality of care to payment. That is a tremendous challenge for healthcare providers that are used to the fee-for-service payment model Medicare traditionally used to reimburse providers. For example, in the fee-for-service payment model, healthcare providers bill Medicare for the number of visits and/or tests they order for the patient. If providers did the work and it’s well documented, they could depend on Medicare payment. Medicare is now shifting that fee-for-service payment model to value-based payment models. Healthcare providers will now be reimbursed for providing high quality services, and incur payment reductions for poor patient outcomes.

A couple of examples of Medicare’s value-based purchasing programs are:

1. Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program. The Affordable Care Act authorizes Medicare to reduce payments to acute care hospitals with excess readmissions for patients who were treated for conditions such as heart attacks, hip and knee replacements, pneumonia, COPD and/or Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery.
2. Hospital Value-Based Purchasing. Medicare adjusts a portion of payments to hospitals at the beginning of each fiscal year based on how well they perform on each outcome measure compared to all hospitals or how much they improve their own performance during a prior baseline period.
3. Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program. The Affordable Care Act also authorized Medicare to reduce payments to hospitals that are in the bottom 25% for certain quality outcomes and hospital acquired conditions.

The healthcare industry now more than ever needs to develop its skill in proactively identifying the root causes of preventable hospital readmissions and the root causes for poor quality measures that affect payment. TapRooT® is a solution. TapRooT® software and training teaches us to identify the real root causes of problems (not just the problems) and build and execute corrective actions that can ensure patients have better experiences and performance outcomes while protecting against payment reductions that hurt the bottom line.

I’ll never forget the mantra of a friend of mine who was an executive at a non-for-profit organization: You can’t help the poor if you are the poor. If healthcare providers don’t transition from the fee-for-service payments to valued-based payment models, it won’t take a root cause analysis to see why they failed.

Learn how to use proactively in our 5-Day TapRooT^® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Training. (View schedule of upcoming courses here.)