The Texas Senate unanimously approved two bills on April 19 to link health care payments to improvements in quality, safety, and efficiency in patient care.  S.B. 7 authorizes the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) to establish an advisory committee, including physicians and other representatives of health care facilities and managed care organizations, to consider appropriate process and outcome measures to be used in quality-based reimbursement systems under Texas Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).   S.B. 7 also authorizes HHSC to align such measures with measures defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and to devise implementation timelines integrated with related CMS initiatives such as conversion to ICD-10 coding.   S.B. 7 requires HHSC to develop methods to identify preventable hospital readmissions and medical complications in hospitals; and it requires HHSC to begin determining Medicaid/CHIP payment adjustments by September 2012 based on hospitals’ rates of preventable readmissions as well as adjustments by September 2013 based on hospitals’ rates of preventable complications.   S.B. 8 would additionally create the Texas Institute of Health Care Quality and Efficiency, an organization to champion payment reform as a means to promote more effective and efficient patient care across all payers in Texas.   S.B. 7 and S.B. 8 must be considered further by the House, but the strong endorsement of Texas’ Lieutenant Governor, remarkable bipartisan support, and the unanimous passage of these bills in the Senate augur well for enactment.