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Study: P4P has little effect on quality

Quality Improvement Monitor, June 8, 2007

Although a new study has found that rewarding hospitals for following quality measures makes little or no difference, the lead researcher says it's too early to give up on pay-for-performance, according to HealthDay.

"What we found was that all the hospitals in the study improved over time: those in the improvement group, which received money, but also those in the control group," Seth W. Glickman, MD, an assistant professor in the division of emergency medicine at Duke University said in the June 6 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which published the study. "All reduced errors at the same rate over time and had the same improvement in survival over time."

Data from 54 hospitals in the "pay-for-performance" group found some improvement, such as better attention to the rule for prescribing aspirin in heart attack cases, according to the study.

But when the researchers looked at comparable data from 446 hospitals with a voluntary quality improvement program that paid no money, they found similar improvements in quality of care and outcome, according to HealthDay.

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