Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration

Launched in October 2003, the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) pay-for-performance project was designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals were effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. Approximately 250 hospitals—small/large, urban/rural, teaching/non-teaching facilities—across 36 U.S. states participated in the demonstration.^[1][2]

Results

Over the first three years of the project (2003–2006), participating hospitals raised overall quality by an average of 15.8 percent^[3] based on their delivery of 30 nationally standardized and widely accepted care measures^[4][5] to patients in these five clinical areas:

• acute myocardial infarction (AMI/heart attack)
• coronary artery bypass graft (CABG)
• heart failure (HF)
• pneumonia (PN)
• hip and knee replacement (HK)

Additional research using the Hospital Compare^[6] dataset for April 2006 to March 2007 showed that HQID participants scored on average 7.48 percentage points higher (91.49 percent to 84.01 percent) than non-participants when evaluating 19 common Hospital Compare measures.^[7]