Pay-Per-Performance Health Care Not Yet Proven To Improve Quality

Pay-Per-Performance Health Care Not Yet Proven To Improve Quality in General Healthcare

In theory, moving to a health care and health insurance system of pay-per-performance is a grand idea.

Doctors improve health care quality by adopting new technologies such as electronic medical records to help reduce errors and strengthen communication, and shy away from expensive tests that might not be necessary.

Doing these things to improve care would increase their payments for their services just as billing as many tests as possible did, if not more.

Some providers around country have indeed implemented such a system, in efforts to improve the quality of care and reduce health care costs at the same time.

But researchers at the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research organization, found that after a few years, such systems haven’t yet borne the results everyone was hoping for.

RAND researchers looked at seven different California health insurance plans and over 200 physicians groups over the course of 6 years, reported Reuters.

RAND’s assessment? So far, no “substantial” gains.

“The true benefits of these programs may take more time to be realized and it is likely that investments in other quality efforts will be needed in addition to performance-based pay,” said RAND senior policy researcher, Cheryl Damberg.

Separate studies from RAND even found pay-per-performance systems interfered with doctor-patient relationships, wrote the article.

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