Medicare's Test Of Pay-For-Performance

Pay-for-Performance
Executive Summary:

Pay for performance is a program that measures performance based payment arrangements which reward money to a specific team or individual for improved behavior or outcomes. " The impetus behind P4P originated in the response to rising medical costs, growth in chronic care conditions, and consumer demands for efficiency and improvement in the quality of care (Bruno, 2012)." This allotted for various performances based programs to arise in the health care setting. One is Medicare 's flagship test of Pay-For-Performance. To see if this study could work, the study examined thousands of hospitals nationwide over a three year period from the fourth quarter of 2003 to the third quarter of 2009 and will be
More specifically, do financial incentives like Medicare’s flagship test of pay for performance improve the lowest performing hospitals compared to hospitals that are above the national median? But, first we should define what pay for performance really is or better known as P4P. Lucia Bruno a doctor and principal shareholder of physicians ' legal group explains it very well. Dr. Bruno says, "P4P programs are performance-based payment arrangements which align financial rewards with improved outcomes and changed behavior. The impetus behind P4P originated in the response to rising medical costs, growth in chronic care conditions, and consumer demands for efficiency and improvement in the quality of care (Bruno, 2012). There are usually three types of ways P4P goes about measuring performance. They are structural measures, process measures, and outcome measures. Structural measures focus on improving key parts of a system to better the quality of a care, while process measures assesses how well a specific health care system follows evidence-based guidelines and protocols (Bruno, 2012). Outcome measures incentives are mainly based on how well a patient is doing. In short, pay for performance is way that our health care system awards its clinicians for good structural, process, and outcome
Although these changes were created specifically for the lower-performing hospitals, evidence displayed that hospitals that already achieved high quality performance ratings above the median had the most improvements and the most benefits out of the implemented program (Ryan, 2012, p.797). With that being said, according to our article, it is safe to say that although the P4P program had the intention to improving a lower-performing hospital, it ended up not being the