Baseline Rehospitalization Rates of Nursing Homes in Bundled Payments for Care Improvement

The Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative was developed by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation with the goals of lowering health care expenditures while improving quality through enhanced coordination of services across different settings of care. 1 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) Initiative: General information. innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/bundled-payments/Date accessed: March 17, 2017 Google Scholar Participating organizations enter into contractual arrangements where a single reimbursement is made from Medicare that must be divided among all providers involved in an episode of care. However, participation in BPCI is voluntary, and it is possible that early participants were already high-performing providers. The objective of this study was to compare baseline 30-day rehospitalization rates of patients receiving post-acute care in nursing homes participating in BPCI to the rates in nursing homes that were not participating in the initiative. There are 4 BPCI models. We focused on Model 3—implemented in the last quarter of 2013—where episodes are initiated by the start of post-acute care following hospital discharge.