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Essay On Cms In Healthcare

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United States Health Care Reimbursement and Health Care Quality CMS Attempt at Improving Health Care Quality Traditionally, healthcare has been based on a volume status, or how many patients a single healthcare provider can see. This overload of patient to healthcare provider has caused a decline of the quality of care patients are receiving. The United States government recognized this and wanted to move to a better system of healthcare, one that is based on quality instead of volume. The United States government, specifically the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), have developed many systems and guidelines to assess quality measures in healthcare. These guidelines set forth by the CMS can be identified as core measures. The CMS is the governing body in charge of Medicare and Medicaid; therefore, they are also the governing body that is responsible …show more content…

These programs are Hospital Readmission Reduction Program and Hospital Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction program. The Hospital Readmission Reduction program allows Medicare to reduce the payment to hospitals if a patient if readmitted under the same DRGs within a certain timeframe. Its main focus is aimed at high cost or high value conditions (https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/linking-quality-to-payment.html). The idea is that a provider will not discharge a patient until they feel the patient has adequately recovered and not be rapidly readmitted because they are still ill thus improving the quality of care a patient will receive. The HAC reduction program allows Medicare to reduce reimbursement if a hospital ranks within the worse performing quartile (25 percent) of a subsection for patients acquiring a hospital infection. This motivates the hospital to improve patient safety by reducing the likelihood of patient getting a HAC

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