The purpose of this project is to examine the impact of nurse staffing and nurse work environment on hospital performance improvement in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)/Premier Inc. Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project. The project specifically addresses CFP Topic Area 2A which has a focus on identifying nurse contributions to hospital performance that is rewarded by pay-for-performance initiatives.
HQID is the first CMS demonstration on the impact of hospital pay-for-performance. Our collaboration with Premier Inc. will allow us to collect detailed information on nurse staffing and the nurse work environment from hospitals participating in HQID. This information will be collected using an appropriate subset of items from the NQF-endorsed consensus standards for nursing sensitive care. We will use hospital performance measures generated for CMS from the HQID project with the main quality metrics being medical condition-specific composite quality scores. Our modeling and data analytic approach uses non-linear multivariate regression techniques to address a series of research questions on the impact of the nursing workforce on hospital performance improvement in HQID.
The project is very timely for affecting policy development/implementation since the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to implement a nationwide value-based purchasing program for all PPS hospitals beginning in fiscal year 2009.
