What value-based purchasing means to your hospital.

Under the new Value-Based Purchasing program, hospitals will receive incentive payments based on how well they perform on 12 clinical process measures and nine patient experience measures or on how much their performance improves relative to a baseline performance period. It is likely that as many hospitals will be penalized with payment reductions under the program as will benefit from payment increases from the incentive payments. It can be argued that the true significance of the program is not so much in the incentive payments as it is in the measurement tools it provides.