Lakeside Health System has been named a top performer in a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Premier healthcare alliance value-based purchasing (VBP) project that rewards hospitals for delivering high quality care in five clinical areas.

Based on fourth-year results from the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project, Lakeside Health System received 4 awards for Top Improvement and Attainment in the clinical area(s) of Pneumonia and Congestive Heart Failure. Due to its successes, Lakeside Health System will receive a bonus payment of $16,256 from CMS, which awarded incentive payments of approximately $12 million to 225 hospitals.

Over the course of the first four years of the project, Lakeside Health System has received one previous  award for Quality and Efficiency in Maternal and Neonatal Care in 2007.  CMS has awarded more than $36.5 million over the first four years of the project.

“Providing outstanding patient care has always been our primary mission,” said Michael Stapleton, CEO. “Our successes in this project are a testament to our ongoing efforts to improve the quality of care we offer our patients.”

“The successes of the hospitals – small and large, urban and rural, teaching and non-teaching – in the HQID project have led to its consideration as the basis for key national health reforms,” said Susan DeVore, Premier President and CEO. “As the proposal of a national value-based purchasing program becomes a reality, hospitals participating in HQID will have six years experience with such a model.”

About the HQID project
The HQID is the first national project of its kind, designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. Through the project, which has been extended by CMS for an additional three years, Premier collects a set of more than 30 evidence-based clinical quality measures from almost 250 hospitals across the country. The quality measures were developed by government and private organizations (for more information on the indicators, visit: www.qualitydemo.com).

HQID tracks process and outcome measures in five clinical areas – acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), pneumonia, and hip and knee replacement.

Improvements in quality of care saved an estimated 4,700 acute myocardial infarction (AMI/heart attack) patients across the first four years of the project, according to an analysis of mortality rates at hospitals participating in the project. In addition, patients received approximately 500,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures, such as smoking cessation, discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination, during that same timeframe.

For hospitals participating in the HQID project, the average Composite Quality Score (CQS), an aggregate of all quality measures within each clinical area, improved by 2.2 percent between the project’s third and fourth year for total gains of 17.2 percent over the project’s first four years. 

Additional research by Premier using the Hospital Compare dataset showed that, by March 2008, HQID participants scored on average 6.9 percentage points higher (94.64 percent to 87.36 percent) than non-participants when evaluating 19 common Hospital Compare measures.

About Premier Inc., 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
The Premier healthcare alliance is more than 2,200 U.S. hospitals and 58,000-plus other healthcare sites working together to improve healthcare quality and affordability. Premier maintains the nation's most comprehensive repository of clinical, financial and outcomes information and operates a leading healthcare purchasing network. A world leader in helping deliver measurable improvements in care, Premier works with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the United Kingdom's National Health Service North West to improve hospital performance. Premier has offices in San Diego, Charlotte, N.C., Philadelphia and Washington.

About Lakeside Health System
Lakeside Health System in Brockport, NY, a 181-bed health care system serving residents in western Monroe, eastern Orleans and northern Genesee counties, is comprised of Lakeside Memorial Hospital, Lakeside Beikirch Care Center, Lakeside Child Care Center, Lakeside Foundation and the Daisy Marquis Jones Family Wellness Center. Lakeside Memorial Hospital is a Joint Commission accredited facility, a designated New York State Stroke Center and recently opened the Lakeside Urgent Care Center in Spencerport. The Health System is consistently recognized for its quality practices and its focus on patient satisfaction and safety, and continues to expand its wide range of specialty services.