A recent study by Premier Inc (Pay-For-Performance Study), shows correlation between high levels of compliance with best practices and lower clinical costs, writes Health Leaders Media.

Health Data Management reports Aetna Inc. will launch a pay-for-performance program for hospitals in two areas of Washington state: Puget Sound and Spokane. The national payer organization has licensed the Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program, a national model for P4P programs from the Leapfrog Group, a Washington-based patient safety advocacy organization sponsored by employers.

AHA News reports that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last week sent Congress its plan for implementing a value-based purchasing program for hospitals under the Medicare inpatient prospective payment system beginning in fiscal year 2009, as required by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.

The Minnesota Medical Association yesterday published a report examining and evaluating Minnesota's pay for performance programs.

AHA News reports that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will solicit home health agencies in seven states to participate in a two-year pay-for-performance demonstration to begin in January. The states are Alabama, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts and Tennessee.

Healthcare IT News reports on the results of a quality pilot involving a collaborative of 44 pediatric practices. The quality initiative demonstrated improved care for nearly 14,000 children with asthma.

The practices comprising Ohio Valley Primary Care Associates, an IPA affiliated with the physician-hospital organization at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, also benefited from the pay-for-performance program linked to the initiative.

Two news items focus on recently published reports on health plans transparency efforts and pay-for-peformance programs.

Physician groups taking part in a Medicare demonstration that rewards them for care management strategies that improve patient outcomes and lower medical costs achieved target performance on most of the project’s quality measures for diabetes care, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced yesterday.

Findings from a three-year study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that among hospitals participating in a voluntary quality-improvement initiative, the pay-for-performance program was not associated with a significant incremental improvement in quality of care or outcomes for acute myocardial infarction.

Pay for performance has been promoted as a tool for improving quality of care. In 2003, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the largest pay-for-performance pilot project to date in the United States, including indicators for acute myocardial infarction. The objective of this study was to determine if pay for performance was associated with either improved processes of care and outcomes or unintended consequences for acute myocardial infarction at hospitals participating in the CMS pilot project. The study also did not find evidence that pay for performance had an adverse association with improvement in processes of care that were not subject to financial incentives. Additional studies of pay for performance are needed to determine its optimal role in quality-improvement initiatives.

An interesting news item in PhillyBurbs.com today: Doylestown Hospital and Aetna announced an agreement this week that will give the hospital bonuses if it meets goals for patient care. The deal would reward the hospital for continuing its campaign to improve the care it provides to patients. Most of the U.S. health care system relies on a fee-for-service structure. Hospitals and doctors are paid according to the kind of health care they provide, not the quality of that care. The pay-for-performance agreement rewards hospitals that are better than their peers with bonus payments.

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A real-time survey taken at a panel session of the Fourth Annual World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C. last week, revealed that 69 percent of attendees feel the federal government isn’t moving fast enough to establish pay-for-performance. This opinion was equally shared by both buyers and providers of healthcare with 49 percent of buyers and 51 percent of providers agreeing they’d like to see P4P advance more quickly.

Read full news item: Majority of stakeholders support moving forward with P4P, Healthcare IT News (04/24)

An interesting news item reported in Kaiser today: AARP officials on Monday announced plans to expand the number of health insurance products offered by the group that will target U.S. residents ages 50 to 64 who lack coverage. AARP plans to "drive its insurer partners to improve the quality of their care" with financial incentives for adherence to recommended treatment practices for conditions such as diabetes and hip fractures and financial penalties for failure to follow the practices.

85% of state Medicaid programs expect to implement pay-for-performance measures within the next five years, according to an IPRO survey, published by The Commonwealth Fund on Thursday April 12th.

Many health care purchasers are trying to link health care spending to quality and efficiency through pay-for-performance (P4P) programs. This report, 'Pay-for-Performance in State Medicaid Programs: A Survey of State Medicaid Directors and Programs', examines the current and planned P4P activities of state Medicaid programs, based on a survey and follow-up interviews with state Medicaid directors and their staffs as well as review of related documents. The authors found that more than half of states currently operate one or more pay-for-performance programs and nearly 85 percent expect to do so within the next five years. Health information technology is an important component of programs now in development. The report outlines the most common measures and incentives, discusses evaluation and reporting approaches, and provides detailed descriptions of each of the pay-for-performance programs. The findings should inform state governments and other stakeholders that are considering modifying or adopting pay-for-performance strategies.

A paper released today, as reported in Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, discusses how Pay-for-performance (P4P) and public quality-reporting programs can increase the quality of health care for the services being measured, but notes that these programs can unintentionally exacerbate racial and ethnic health disparities if they are not designed with attention to these issues. The authors (Lawrence Casalino, an assistant professor of health studies at the University of Chicago, and Arthur Elster, director of the medicine and public health division at the American Medical Association) describe how these programs could lead to increased disparities, and they suggest ways to prevent adding to disparities and, in some cases, how to reduce them.

An interesting article in Government Health IT today looks at whether measuring medical peformance leads to better patient health. The simple answer is yes according to this article, but the measures need to be more focused.