Characteristics and quality of nursing homes reporting COVID-19 admissions from hospitals.

See related letter by Gilman et al.

Trends in COVID-19 death rates by racial composition of nursing homes.

See related letter by Gilman et al.

The Financial Effect of Value-Based Purchasing and the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program on Safety-Net Hospitals in 2014: A Cohort Study.

Background: Medicare's value-based purchasing (VBP) and the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) could disproportionately affect safety-net hospitals.

Objective: To determine whether safety-net hospitals incur larger financial penalties than other hospitals under VBP and HRRP.

Design: Cross-sectional analysis.

Safety-net hospitals more likely than other hospitals to fare poorly under Medicare's value-based purchasing.

Medicare's value-based purchasing (VBP) program potentially puts safety-net hospitals at a financial disadvantage compared to other hospitals. In 2014, the second year of the program, patient mortality measures were added to the VBP program's algorithm for assigning penalties and rewards. We examined whether the inclusion of mortality measures in the second year of the program had a disproportionate impact on safety-net hospitals nationally.

California safety-net hospitals likely to be penalized by ACA value, readmission, and meaningful-use programs.

The Affordable Care Act includes provisions to increase the value obtained from health care spending. A growing concern among health policy experts is that new Medicare policies designed to improve the quality and efficiency of hospital care, such as value-based purchasing (VBP), the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), and electronic health record (EHR) meaningful-use criteria, will disproportionately affect safety-net hospitals, which are already facing reduced disproportionate-share hospital (DSH) payments under both Medicare and Medicaid. We examined hospitals in California to determine whether safety-net institutions were more likely than others to incur penalties under these programs.

Telehealth and Medicare: payment policy, current use, and prospects for growth.

Objective: Evaluate the growth in various types of Medicare-paid telehealth services.

Background: There has been a long-standing hope that telehealth could be used to reduce rural patients' travel times to specialty physicians. Medicare covers telehealth services provided through live, interactive videoconferencing between a beneficiary located at a certified rural site and a distant practitioner.