Health Affairs’ April Issue: The Cost And Quality Of Cancer Care

This study is part of Health Affairs’ DataWatch series. Under the new pay-for-performance models, how do low performers fare? Jessica Greene of George Washington University’s School of Nursing and coauthors studied the impact of a primary care provider compensation model—that of Fairview Health Service, a Pioneer accountable care organization in Minnesota—in which 40 percent of providers’ compensation was based on their clinic-level quality outcomes. The researchers examined providers’ performance data before the model and two years after implementation, The best predictor of improvement was the primary care providers’ baseline quality performance. Greene and coauthors found that the providers whose baseline scores placed them in the lowest one-third in terms of performance on three quality metrics improved three times more, on average, than those in the middle-third, and almost six times as much as those in the top-third. The authors note that payment reform may help narrow variation in primary care performance. One of the nation’s largest fee-for-value initiatives among the first to show promise. Christy Harris Lemak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and coauthors analyzed Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan’s Physician Group Incentive Program’s impact on quality and spending for more than three million beneficiaries across 11,000 primary care practices from 2008 to 2011. They found practice participation in the fee-for-value program was associ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Access All Categories Chronic Care Comparative Effectiveness Consumers Europe Health Care Costs Health Care Delivery Pharma Policy Quality Research Source Type: blogs