Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health
Population Health Research Brief Series
Financial Rewards Tied to Quality Measures Lead Home Health Agencies to Exaggerate Their Improvements
Jun Li and Meher Chahal
April 2023
Abstract
More than 4 million people in the United States use home health care each year, but the quality varies and is often poor. In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began rewarding and penalizing home health agencies for their performance on a set of predetermined quality measures in an experiment called the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) program. This brief summarizes the results of a recent study evaluating the program’s impact on quality measures within the HHVBP and whether there was a relationship between incentive size and apparent quality. Findings suggest that while financial rewards improved the quality of care, some of the improvements may be related to data manipulation by the home health agencies.