Nearly 4000 skilled nursing facilities will receive bonuses from Medicare this year while nearly 11,000 will be penalized under Medicare’s Skilled Nursing Facility Value-Based Purchasing Program.
The program, created in 2014, rewards nursing homes that keep low the number of patients who must be admitted to hospitals during the year and penalizes those with the highest hospital admission rates.
Successful nursing homes will receive bonuses of as much as 1.6 percent for each Medicare patient they serve while those that had too many hospital admissions will face penalties of nearly two percent for all of their Medicare patients.
On the whole, non-profit and government-owned nursing homes fared better than for-profit facilities. More than half of all nursing homes in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington state will receive bonuses while 85 percent of those in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi will be penalized.
Learn more about Medicare’s Skilled Nursing Facility Value-Based Purchasing Program and its impact on nursing homes in this Kaiser Health News report.