The Arkansas Medicaid Inpatient Quality Incentive (IQI) Program is offered by the State of Arkansas under the Arkansas Medicaid program. Through a partnership between Arkansas Medicaid, Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care (AFMC), and the Arkansas Hospital Association (AHA), the IQI Program was developed in early 2006 to assess quality of care through the ways in which hospitals provide medical care to patients.
Bonus (incentive) payments, also referred to as gainsharing under this program, are given to hospitals for improving health care and patient outcomes. The bonus payments are based on each hospital's performance on measures selected by the IQI advisory committee comprised of hospital, Arkansas Medicaid, AFMC, and AHA members.
Hospitals participating in the IQI Program collect and submit data on all quality measures for which they are eligible to report into the Arkansas Medicaid Abstraction and Reporting Tool for collection and analysis of the quality improvement data. Other data sources, such as Medicaid claims data, may be used for purposes of data collection as well.
Designed as a pay-for-performance tool, the IQI Program performance assessment methods include calculating measure rates and performance thresholds and includes a validation component—an important feature of the quality program.
The IQI Program is open to Arkansas acute care hospitals, excluding state operated teaching hospitals, rehabilitative hospitals, critical access hospitals, and inpatient psychiatric hospitals.
IQI SFY2025 Criteria and Specifications Manual Training
IQI Resources
IQI SFY2025 Specifications Manual
IQI SFY2024 Specifications Manual
IQI SFY2023 Specifications Manual
IQI SFY2022 Specifications Manual
IQI SFY2021 Specifications Manual
Arkansas Medicaid Abstraction & Reporting Tool (AMART)
The Arkansas Medicaid Abstraction & Reporting Tool (AMART) is a powerful application for the collection and analysis of quality improvement data. Through data collection, AMART enables hospitals to comprehensively evaluate and manage quality improvement efforts in the Arkansas Medicaid IQI program.
