VBP: Can you get there on today's IT?

For the nation's hospitals, information requirements of the federal government's imminent reimbursement reform initiative ­ called value-based purchasing ­are starting out easy. Deceptively easy.

An initial set of 12 "core measures" of performance quality, for which hospitals must show achievement or improvement to earn bonus money, is already part of a larger measure set that providers have compiled and sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services since 2003. The second component of the value-based formula ­ eight measures of inpatient experiences was lifted from a survey that hospitals have mailed to discharged patients, with the results made public since 2007.