What Is Ohio's Nursing Facility Quality Incentive Payment Program?

Ohio Medicaid reimburses nursing facilities through a rate made up of several components, and one piece — the Quality Incentive Payment (QIP) — rewards facilities that score well on a state quality measure rather than simply paying every facility the same rate. In effect, a portion of Medicaid's nursing-facility payment pool is distributed based on each facility's quality score, so higher-performing nursing homes receive more per Medicaid resident-day than lower-scoring ones. The program has been in the news in 2026: nursing facilities statewide are owed hundreds of millions of dollars in QIP back payments following an Ohio Supreme Court ruling, and the Ohio Department of Medicaid has been working through implementation while providers and the legislature continue to dispute the rate-calculation method going forward. This is a facility-funding mechanism, not something a resident or family applies for directly — it's worth knowing about mainly because a facility's public quality score can be one more data point (alongside inspection reports) when comparing nursing homes, distinct from the Medicaid eligibility rules covered in our Medicaid and PASSPORT explainer.