(WASHINGTON, D.C.)—The Leapfrog Group, with support from The Commonwealth Fund and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has developed the first public Web-based incentive and reward programs aimed at improving health care.. The Leapfrog Incentive and Reward Compendium is designed to help raise awareness among purchasers, health plans, and health care providers about innovative schemes that are already in place to improve the quality and affordability of health care.

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The Leapfrog Incentive and Reward Compendium documents and categorizes both financial programs, such as those that reward providers with quality bonuses, and non-financial programs, such as those that reward providers with public recognition.

Currently, the Leapfrog Compendium details 77 programs from around the country, including 17 that incorporate Leapfrog’s performance measures. The majority of the programs included in the Compendium are initiated by health plans, purchasers, or purchasing coalitions
and target hospitals, physicians, health plans, and consumers.

According to Suzanne Delbanco, chief executive officer of The Leapfrog Group, “Part of Leapfrog’s mission is to promote high-value health care through incentives and rewards. A number of Leapfrog members and health plans have set the pace and shown a commitment to improve quality by launching groundbreaking incentive and reward programs. We hope this tool will act as a catalyst by creating greater public awareness and provide an educational avenue to disseminate lessons learned, best practices, and program comparisons.”

About The Leapfrog Group
The Leapfrog Group was founded in November 2000 by the Business Roundtable and includes more than 150 Fortune 500 corporations and other large private and public sector health benefits, representing more than 34 million enrollees.

The Group’s mission is to trigger giant leaps in the safety, quality, and affordability of healthcare by:
- Supporting informed health care decisions by those who use and pay for health care; and,
- Promoting high-value health care through incentives and rewards.

The Leapfrog Group has four measures of hospital performance in the safety and quality of health care:
- Computer Physician Order Entry: Hospital staff enters patient prescriptions and other orders into computers linked to error prevention software.
- ICU Physician Staffing: Staffing ICUs with trained ICU specialists (intensivists).
- Evidence-Based Hospital Referral: The survey queries hospitals about how many times a year they perform five high-risk surgeries and asked those with neonatal intensive care units (NICU)about how many infants they typically care for in the NICU each day. In addition, for some of the evidencebased hospital referral categories, hospitals are now able to report their adherence to patient care processes correlated with high-quality, as well as risk-adjusted outcome information.

- NQF Safe Practices: Hospitals will be able to submit their progress on the remaining 27 NQFendorsed Safe Practices which have been approved in a formal consensus development process.

Hospital quality data can be found at www.leapfroggroup.org.In addition to The Leapfrog Group’s Web site, Leapfrog member corporations and organizations are making hospital-specific information available to employees through corporate Web sites and employee health care benefits materials. In addition, many health plans and the following Web-based vendors also will be disseminating the data:

Select Quality Care; and Health Grades, Inc.
Partnering in this effort are The MEDSTAT Group and HealthGrades. The MEDSTAT Group
(www.medstat.com) is providing data collection, analysis and support services for this effort. This includes designing and developing the online hospital survey, fielding the survey via the Web and reporting the results to The Leapfrog Group. HealthGrades is Leapfrog’s technology partner, providing data analysis and a consumer ratings system of the results. HealthGrades also will display the data on its own Web site (www.healthgrades.com).