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What kind of advances do you expect in 2005 for pay-for-performance (P4P) programs?
(Paul Keckley,Ph.D., executive director of the Vanderbilt Center for Evidence-based Medicine) The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have set forth some fairly significant opportunities for hospitals in the acute setting to get beyond hip replacement, congestive heart failure and community-acquired pneumonia as three targeted population groups for which there are performance incentives, to a next set of perhaps a dozen more conditions. With government representing 45 percent of payments, that’s a pretty good P4P target on the hospital side.
On the medical group side it’s less clear. There’s still a significant gap in the adoption of technology. Progress there will be slower. P4P programs need to look more closely at primary care settings. Forty-seven percent of the doctors in the United States are in primary care practice. Better than 85 percent lacked any information technology for capturing patient data. That needs to be the focus. We’ll stimulate at the primary care level adoption of information technology as the incentive as an interim step.
Related Resource:
Pay for Performance: Raising the Bar on Quality, Efficiency and Results
For more information, please contact: The Vanderbilt Center for Evidence-Based Medicine, 2409 Camino Ramon, San Ramon, CA, 94583, (615) 343-3922.
Copyright 2005.
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