Over 700 Hospitals Facing Penalties from HAC Reduction Program

764 hospitals across the US will face penalties in 2022 due to not meeting value-based standards set by Medicare’s Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program. The program, which rates hospitals based on the number of avoidable complications, will dock 1% of Medicare payments to hospitals falling in the bottom quartile. However, data from 2020 will be excluded due to the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Victoria Bailey in a Revcycle Intelligence article, “Since its implementation in 2014, the HAC program has penalized 1,978 hospitals at least once as of 2021. Just over 1,300 of those hospitals have been penalized at least twice, while 77 hospitals have received Medicare payment cuts every year. Hospitals and their stakeholders have been vocal about their criticism of the value-based program. They have stated that the program standards are arbitrary and do not produce fair results, the brief mentioned.”

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(Source: Revcycle Intelligence, February 7^th, 2022)