Forty-seven upstate New York hospitals and health centers — including ENH-Lockport and ENH-Newfane — last year earned $24.5 million in quality improvement incentive payments from Univera Healthcare and its Rochester-based parent as part of the health insurer’s Hospital Performance Incentive Program (HPIP). In the past 10 years quality performance incentives have exceeded $169 million.

“With all the changes in health care brought about by the Affordable Care Act, we applaud our hospital partners for continuing to focus on improving the quality of care and patient safety,” said Carrie Frank, vice president of quality and health informatics at Univera Healthcare.

Participating in this program in 2013 were 15 Western New York hospitals and health centers, including the two Eastern Niagar Health System sites, three Catholic Health System sites, Erie County Medical Center, four Kaleida Health sites, Mount St. Mary’s Hospital, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, United Memorial Medical Center, Women’s Christian Association (WCA) Hospital and Chautauqua Integrated Delivery System.

Launched in 2004, the HPIP program evaluates participating hospitals on over 250 performance measures. In 2013, hospitals achieved 89 percent of all target quality levels. In addition to required clinical and patient safety measures, other nationally-endorsed measures and target outcomes are jointly agreed upon by each hospital and the health insurer using benchmarks established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, The Joint Commission, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and others.

Areas targeted for improvement include:

• Clinical Processes of Care – Focused on improvements in heart attack care, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical care
• Patient Safety – Centered on reductions in hospital-acquired infections, falls, pressure ulcers, readmissions,  and other adverse events or errors that affect patient care
• Patient Satisfaction – Using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, which is the first national, standardized, publicly-reported survey of patients’ perspectives of hospital care

"Univera Healthcare has continued to reward improvements in quality through our contracts with hospitals,” said Frank. “These improvements also have the effect of lowering the costs of care, which is critical to hospitals in this environment.”

Univera does not disclose how much each hospital or health care center got of the annual incentive payments.

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