How Nursing Affects Medicare’s Outcome-Based Hospital Payments

Improving value is one of the central aims of recent and ongoing health care reform. In our last LDI/INQRI Brief, we reviewed the evidence of the role of nurses in increasing the value of health care. In this companion brief, we dig deeper into the three reimbursement strategies that Medicare uses to align hospital financial incentives with quality of care, and we calculate the potential effects of nursing-sensitive quality indicators on hospital payments.