Bundled Payment Episodes Initiated by Physician Group Practices: Medicare Beneficiary Perceptions of Care Quality

Background The Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative incentivizes participating providers to reduce total Medicare payments for an episode of care. However, there are concerns that reducing payments could reduce quality of care. Objective To assess the association of BPCI with patient-reported functional status and care experiences. Design We surveyed a stratified random sample of Medicare beneficiaries with BPCI episodes attributed to participating physician group practices, and matched comparison beneficiaries, after hospitalization for one of the 18 highest volume clinical episodes. The sample included beneficiaries discharged from the hospital from February 2017 through September 2017. Beneficiaries were surveyed approximately 90 days after their hospital discharge. We estimated risk-adjusted differences between the BPCI and comparison groups, pooled across all 18 clinical episodes and separately for the five largest clinical episodes. Participants Medicare beneficiaries with BPCI episodes ( n =16,898, response rate=44.5%) and comparison beneficiaries hospitalized for similar conditions selected using coarsened exact matching ( n =14,652, response rate=46.2%). Main Measures Patient-reported functional status, care experiences, and overall satisfaction with recovery. Key Results Overall, we did not find differences between the BPCI and comparison respondents across seven measures of change in functional status or overall satisfaction with recovery. Both BPCI and comparison respondents reported generally positive care experiences, but BPCI respondents were less likely to report positive care experience for 3 of 8 measures (discharged at the right time, −1.2 percentage points (pp); appropriate level of care, −1.8 pp; preferences for post-discharge care taken into account, −0.9 pp; p