Tuesday, 27 December 2005
Pay For Performance: Just A Lot Of Talk?
The vast majority of doctors get the same pay no matter whether they give their patients outstanding or inadequate care. In attempts to right the balance, some communities have taken the first tentative steps towards adopting pay for performance programs.
A pay for performance (P4P) program usually refers to giving doctors financial rewards when they meet goals such as patient satisfaction, cost containment and practicing preventative care.
The Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) recently took a look at some communities that have P4P programs in place and found most of them to be off to a sluggish start.
"While there's been plenty of buzz about pay for performance as a way to improve health care quality, the reality is that these initiatives are off to a slow start in many communities," said Paul B. Ginsburg, Ph.D., president of HSC, a nonpartisan policy research organization funded principally by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The HSC tracked 12 communities for the last 10 years and found only two of them, Orange County, California and Boston, have P4P programs of any significance.
In some of the communities studied, very few doctors have seen payments related to the quality of care they practice. The study found that these doctors regarded P4Ps anywhere from skeptically to openly hostile.
For more information, check out the full study.
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