Excellus awards five CNY hospitals more than $5 million for quality improvements

DeWITT, N.Y. — Excellus BlueCross BlueShield has awarded five Central New York hospitals a total of $5.6 million in quality improvement incentive payments for their involvement in the 2018 program.

They included Crouse Hospital, St. Joseph’s Health Hospital, the two sites of Upstate University Hospital, Oswego Hospital, and Guthrie Cortland Medical Center, Excellus said in a news release.

Rochester–based Excellus is Central New York’s largest health insurer.

The local hospitals were among 36 upstate New York hospitals that the health insurer awarded nearly $26 million in quality improvement payments as part of the nonprofit’s performance-incentive program.

Since 2005, Excellus’s program has paid out more than $282 million in quality improvement incentives, the nonprofit said.

“When a health insurer collaborates with health-care providers, as we are doing with this hospital-quality program, health outcomes improve, and incentives are fully aligned for the communities we jointly serve,” Carrie Whitcher, Excellus VP of health-care improvement, contended in the release.

“In 2018, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield’s Hospital Performance Incentive Program evaluated participating hospitals on 59 unique performance measures,” Dr. LouAnne Giangreco, Excellus VP and chief medical officer for health-care improvement, said. “We credit our hospital partners for their continuous commitment to quality improvement, and for achieving 77 percent of all quality improvement targets.”

In addition to meeting required clinical and patient-safety measures in 2018, each hospital and the health insurer “jointly agreed” on “other nationally endorsed measures” using benchmarks that the Baltimore, Maryland–based Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Boston, Massachusetts–based Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and others had established, per the release.

Improvement areas

Areas targeted for 2018 improvement included clinical processes of care, which focused on improvements in diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, surgical care, along with “other measures that may be unique to each participating hospital.”

They also included patient safety, centering on reductions in hospital-acquired infections, readmissions, and other adverse events or errors that affect patient care

The improvement areas also included patient satisfaction, using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, which is a “national, standardized, publicly-reported” survey of patients’ perspectives of hospital care.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com

BJNN file photo by Eric Reinhardt