On February 28, 2012, CMS hosted a “national provider call” on the hospital inpatient value-based purchasing (VBP) program in which CMS explained that “dry run” VBP reports would be available to each hospital through the hospital’s QualityNet account as of February 29, 2012. These dry run reports will be hospital-specific and will use the same parameters established for the 2013 VBP program except that they will use earlier baseline and performance periods than those employed for the 2013 VBP program.

Specifically, the dry run reports will use a hospital’s data from April 1, 2008 – December 31, 2008 as the baseline period, and data from April 1, 2010 – December 31, 2010 as the hypothetical “performance” period. (The 2013 VBP program uses a baseline period of July 1, 2009 – March 31, 2010 and a performance period of July 1, 2011 – March 31, 2012.) CMS included several sample VBP reports illustrating various performance scenarios in its presentation. Although the individualized dry run reports available on QualityNet will be educational only and will have no effect on payments, they nevertheless will familiarize hospitals with how the VBP report results will look and may give a hospital a sense of how it will perform in the 2013 program if no significant changes were made between the dry run performance period and the actual 2013 VBP performance period.