Medical care research and review : MCRR
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Pay-for-performance (P4P) programs offer health care providers financial incentives to achieve predefined quality targets. Practice executives sit at a key nexus point for determining how P4P programs are implemented in physician practices. ⋯ The authors discuss five different ways in which practice executives distribute rewards to physicians. These findings may help payers more effectively design and implement financial rewards for quality.
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This article evaluates the impact of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services/Premier pay-for-performance demonstration project on performance improvement in three clinical areas in a multihospital health care system. The study compares a group of hospitals participating in this project against a control group of similar hospitals that did not participate. Although the incentives are extremely small, the findings show that participation in the pay-for-performance initiative had a significant impact on the rate and magnitude of performance improvement. The project led to marked improvement in the quality of clinical process delivery and accelerated the adoption of evidence-based practices.