Medicare patients with social risk factors fare worse than others in programs that measure quality and the providers that serve them also perform worse than others on quality measures.
This news comes from a new report presented to Congress by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning Evaluation.
ASPEsealThe report, mandated by the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act of 2014, focused on nine Medicare payment programs:

  1. the hospital readmissions reduction program
  2. the hospital value-based purchasing program
  3. the hospital acquired condition reduction program
  4. the Medicare Advantage (Part C) quality star rating program
  5. the Medicare shared savings program
  6. the physician value-based payment modifier program
  7. the end-stage renal disease quality incentive program
  8. the skilled nursing facility value-based purchasing program
  9. the home health value-based purchasing program

APSE concluded that:

  • Beneficiaries with social risk factors had worse outcomes on many quality measures, regardless of the providers they saw, and dual enrollment status was the most powerful predictor of poor outcomes.
  • Providers that disproportionately served beneficiaries with social risk factors tended to have worse performance on quality measures, even after accounting for their beneficiary mix. Under all five value-based purchasing programs in which penalties are currently assessed, these providers experienced somewhat higher penalties than did providers serving fewer beneficiaries with social risk factors.

Among the solutions suggested in the report for addressing these problems are:

  • adjusting quality and resource use measures
  • adjusting payments
  • addressing the underlying issues

The report also suggests that HHS’s strategy for accounting for social risk in Medicare’s value-based purchasing programs should consist of the following three steps:

  • measure and report quality for beneficiaries with social risk factors
  • set high, fair quality standards for all beneficiaries
  • reward and support better outcomes for beneficiaries with social risk factors

And in carrying out these steps, the report recommends that HHS

  • provide specific payment adjustments to reward achievement and/or improvement for beneficiaries with social risk factors, and
  • where feasible, provide targeted support for providers who disproportionately serve them.

Medicare beneficiaries who present with socio-economic risk factors are served by Pennsylvania safety-net hospitals in especially large numbers.
Learn more about the problems APSE found and its proposals for dealing with those problems by reading Report to Congress: Social Risk Factors and Performance Under Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing Programs.