Background
The Nursing Home Value-Based Purchasing (NHVBP) Demonstration is part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of care furnished to Medicare beneficiaries. Under this demonstration, CMS will offer financial incentives to nursing homes that meet certain conditions for providing high quality care. The demonstration will be open to free-standing and hospital-based facilities and will include beneficiaries who are on a Part A stay as well as those with Part B coverage only. The demonstration will be conducted in 3 states: Arizona, New York and Wisconsin.
Basic Approach
Each year of the demonstration, CMS will assess each participating nursing home’s quality performance based on four domains: staffing, appropriate hospitalizations, minimum data set (MDS) outcomes, and survey deficiencies. CMS will award points to each nursing home based on how they perform on the measures within each of the domains. These points will be summed to produce an overall quality score. For each State, nursing homes with scores in the top 20 percent and homes that are in the top 20 percent in terms of improvement in their scores will be eligible for a share of that State’s savings pool (AHCA, April 2012).