A study performed for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calls for greater use of value-based purchasing in federal health care reimbursement policy.

The study, performed by the RAND Corporation, recommends developing a national value-based purchasing strategy; developing a more deliberate approach to evaluating the effectiveness of value-based purchasing efforts; and developing performance measures that support value-based purchasing approaches.

Such an approach could be a major challenge for private safety-net hospitals, according to a Harvard School of Public Health analysis that found that in the first year of Medicare’s value-based purchasing program, hospitals that served the largest numbers of low-income patients suffered the largest financial penalties from that program.

Read more about the RAND study in this Fierce Healthcare story and find the RAND study itself here.  Read another Fierce Healthcare article about the impact of value-based purchasing on safety-net hospitals here.