Sacred Heart gets performance pay

Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane has earned a bonus of more than $256,000 for its results in a Medicare pay-for-performance experiment.

The center was rated in the top 10 percent for treatment of heart attack and heart failure and in the top 20 percent for patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery in the second year of the voluntary study that includes 266 hospitals nationwide.

Sacred Heart also performed in the half of all performance measures set out in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration sponsored by Premier Inc., a nonprofit hospital alliance.

Medicare awarded about $8.7 million in bonuses this week to 115 top-performing hospitals posting results in five clinical areas. Sacred Heart’s share was the fifth-highest awarded to any hospital, officials in Spokane said.

Two other regional hospitals, Holy Family Hospital in Spokane and Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d’Alene, are also included in the study. Those hospitals performed in the top 50 percent of hospitals for treatment of heart attack, results showed.