A Look at Medicare’s Hospital-Acquired Conditions Reduction Program

Medicare’s Hospital-Acquired Conditions Reduction Program (HACRP) is a value-based-purchasing program for Medicare that aims to link Medicare payments to a hospital’s level of inpatient health care quality. Jacob Madden, Research Specialist, Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Christina Yen, MD, MBE, Medical Director of Antimicrobial Stewardship, Maine Medical Center, discuss how the HACRP works, how hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) affect hospitals’ ability to care for patients, how a hospital’s HAC score is calculated, what happened to the HACRP during the pandemic, and what a successful post-pandemic HACRP might look like. Jacob recently authored an article for AHLA's Journal of Health and Life Sciences Law about this issue. To learn more about AHLA and the educational resources available to the health law community, visit americanhealthlaw.org.