Medicare Payments for Common Inpatient Procedures: Implications for Episode-based Payment Bundling

Health Services Research
Birkmeyer JD, Gust C, Baser O,  Dimick JB, Sutherland JM,  Skinner JS

Aiming to align provider incentives toward improving quality and efficiency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is considering broader bundling of hospital and physician payments around episodes of inpatient surgery. Decisions about bundled payments would benefit from better information about how payments are currently distributed among providers of different perioperative services and how payments vary across hospitals.