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Study: P4P program not working-yet

Patient Financial Services Weekly Advisor, June 8, 2007

According to a recent study, the pay-for-performance (P4P) program hasn't significantly improved the quality of care at participating hospitals, reports the Washington Post.

But there is still time to further examine the program, which gives hospitals additional money for following best-practice treatment guidelines.

"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," Dr. Seth W. Glickman, an assistant professor in the division of emergency medicine at Duke University who led the study, told the Post. "All reduced errors at the same rate over time and had the same improvement in survival over time."

CMS launched the P4P pilot project in 2003. Initially, hospitals improved in some areas, such as giving aspirin in heart attack cases, according to the report published in the June 6 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But researchers then looked at date from 446 hospitals which had a voluntary improvement program, without financial incentives, and found similar results.

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