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Financial Rewards Tied To Quality Measures Lead Home Health Agencies To Exaggerate Their Improvements, Jun Li, Meher Chahal

Population Health Research Brief Series

More than 4 million people in the United States use home health care each year, but the quality varies and is often poor. In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began rewarding and penalizing home health agencies for their performance on a set of predetermined quality measures in an experiment called the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) program. This brief summarizes the results of a recent study evaluating the program’s impact on quality measures within the HHVBP and whether there was a relationship between incentive size and apparent quality. Findings suggest that while financial rewards improved the …