Translating Value-Based Purchasing into Value-Based Care

Introducing Value-Based Purchasing into TRICARE Reform.

TRICARE, the health benefits program created for beneficiaries of the U.S. Department of Defense, covers health care provided in military treatment facilities and by civilian providers. Congress is now considering how to update TRICARE, which was first developed in the 1980s drawing on managed care concepts from civilian health plans. This article places TRICARE's current managed care strategy ...

Will value-based purchasing increase disparities in care?

F incentives for improving quality and efficiency have gone mainstream in U.S. health care. After years of small-scale pilot projects, demonstrations, and experiments, the Affordable Care Act mandated that Medicare payment to hospitals and physicians must depend, in part, on metrics of quality and efficiency. The first program to do so is Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP), which began affe...

Translating PDDL2.2. into a Constraint-based Variable/Value Language

We develop a translation from PDDL2.2 into NDDL, the language used by NASA’s EUROPA2 planning system. Starting from a PDDL2.2 description of the world based on propositions and operators, we generate an NDDL model that features timelines, activities and compatibilities. The relevance of the translation is twofold. From a theoretical point of view, the translation is interesting since it transfo...

Value-Based Purchasing As a Bridge Between Value and Access

Valuing improvement in value-based purchasing.

BACKGROUND Medicare will soon implement hospital value-based purchasing (VBP) using a scoring system that rewards both achievement (absolute performance) and improvement (performance increase over time). However, improvement is defined so as to give less credit to initial low performers than initial high performers. Because initial low performers are disproportionately hospitals in socioeconomi...