Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program Launched

The Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program is an initiative to provide incentives and rewards for hospitals that are both high quality and demonstrate efficient use of resources. Leapfrog designed the program and is bringing it to the marketplace as a turn-key solution for health plans and purchasers to reward hospitals financially for higher performance or for making improvements in both quality and efficiency.

The program initially focuses on five clinical areas that represent a significant proportion of hospital admissions and expenditures among the commercially-insured population: coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), acute myocardial infarction (AMI), community acquired pneumonia (CAP) and deliveries / newborn care.

Leapfrog has drawn on measures endorsed by the National Quality Forum including its own to identify quality measures for each of these five conditions.  The measure of resource use, developed by Medstat, looks at severity-adjusted length of stay and re-admission rates for each of the conditions.

All of the quality data for the program is already collected via the Leapfrog Hospital Quality and Safety Survey and the JCAHO ORYX initiative and therefore represent no additional reporting burden for participating hospitals. The resource use data will also be reported by hospitals to their ORYX vendor.

Hospitals will be ranked into four tiers based on both the quality and resource use measures.  Hospitals’ data will be scored and ranked separately and rewards will be calculated separately for each of the five conditions in which hospitals participate.

Hospitals:

  • Can participate in one to five of the clinical areas;
  • Provide their quality and resource data to the Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program via Leapfrog’s survey and their ORYX vendor;
  • Can participate without making their results public; however, a hospital that chooses not to make its results public will not be eligible for the incentives and rewards; and,
  • Receive data feedback from Leapfrog semi-annually so that they can benchmark performance against peers.

Health plans and employers:

  • Can participate by incorporating the data (the scored quality and resource-use data) into their existing incentive programs; or
  • Can participate by licensing the entire turn-key Program, including actuarial analyses and implementation toolkits, as designed by Leapfrog; or
  • Employers and business coalitions without the internal resources to administer the program can license the entire Program through Bridges to Excellence.  Bridges to Excellence is an employer-sponsored initiative with expertise in administering rewards programs in the ambulatory setting. More information on Bridges to Excellence can be found at www.bridgestoexcellence.org.

For more information on the Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program, please see the program web site at: https://leapfrog.medstat.com/hrp/index.asp [2/05]