Pay for Performance: A step in right direction
Patient awareness:
You can gauge the level of interest has considerably gone up among patients in their care decision from the trends in web traffic volumes for last 3-4 years around healthcare portal sites(Eg: WebMD), clinical outcome scores (e.g., Health Grades) or healthcare blog sites. While some patients may not be educated or qualified to understand the information, perception matters--and may ultimately influence their care decisions.
Informed decision making:
Pay-for-performance programs allow patients to compare the care offered at various hospitals based upon clearly defined and standardized metrics.
Payers will provide clinical outcome data to customers and encourage them to use it in order to bring down their reimbursement cost.
Such incentives will help increase the importance of the quality information being published. Hospitals that perform well on quality indicators can leverage their scores to differentiate themselves from their competitors, thereby resulting in improved public awareness and increased patient preference to obtain their care there.
Physician- Hospital collaborative Incentive
Positive patient outcomes require a collaborative effort on the part of doctors and hospitals. Physician can provide quality care by working collaboratively with the hospital support staff. The win-win situation achieved through P4P is that a physician will be incentivized for achieving higher compliance score and the hospital in turn can expect better reimbursements on the services delivered. Again the non financial incentive in terms of improved public awareness and increased patient preference. Moreover, the good compliance scores of physicians, nurses and support staff can be a good recruiting tool. Hospitals with superior quality outcomes would be in a position to attract top physicians and top physicians can expect premiums on their services. This doesn’t not mean the patient pays for the premium. The hospital would be able to being down the operational cost by using the services of efficient physicians and there by passing on that benefit to the patient.
My common sense suggest P4P is a step in right directions, however there are many who have opposed the merits of the program for its stress on evidence based medicine to experience & skills of individuals. They claim these programs would slowly kill the innovation in Medicare. I have always liked the statement " In god we believe blindly, for everything else provide data". P4P advocates the same.
