Do hospitals that participate in HVBP actually provide better quality care?

Incentives can work wonders in promoting individuals or entities to do something they wouldn’t necessarily engage in normally. Hospital Value Based Purchasing (HVBP) is a pay-for-performance program that was started by the Centers of Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) and it aims to do just that. The end goal of this program is to provide acute care hospital patients high quality care and to better the overall hospital stay experience for patients. However, few have asked the question of whether these hospitals that participate in HVBP actually provide better quality of care to their patients in comparison to the hospitals that do not participate in this pay-for-performance program. In this paper, three response non-HVBP variables will be used in order to assess quality of care: the all cause hospital-wide readmission rate, the serious complication rate, and the median wait time in the emergency department. Through the use of multilinear regression models, the determination of whether participating hospitals provide better quality for care will be assessed