P4P Has Little Effect On How Hospitals Care For Patients

Medicare planners say financial incentives can prompt hospitals to improve their care efficiency and quality, but a recent Medicare-agency pilot project suggests otherwise, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

A study that researchers at Duke University performed examined heart-attack treatment at 500 hospitals -- 54 hospitals that received financial incentives to improve performance and 446 "control" hospitals that received no financial incentives.

The results for hospitals receiving the incentives were dismal; these hospitals showed no significant increase in performance when the researchers compared them to hospitals that did not receive any bonuses, reports the Wall Street Journal.

"The pay-for-performance program was not associated with a significant incremental improvement in quality of care or outcome for acute myocardial infarction," concluded the study, which recently appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But the researchers say that the whole problem may not lie within the pay-for-performance (P4P) program itself. Lenient penalties for noncompliance may also be a culprit.