Paying clinicians to reach a common, fixed performance target may produce little gain in overall quality, and may largely reward those with higher performance at baseline, according to a study in the October 12 issue of JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The number of health plans and purchasers in the United States that have adopted pay-for-performance mechanisms for quality improvement is growing rapidly, according to background information in the article. However, most of these programs are in the early stages of trial, evaluation, and adjustment. Although there is intense interest in and optimism about pay-for-performance programs among many policy makers and payers, there is little published research on pay-for-performance in health care. There have been a few studies demonstrating that pay-for-performance leads to improved quality of care.
Meredith B. Rosenthal, Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues conducted a study on the impact of a prototypical physician pay-for-performance on quality of care within one of the nation's largest health plans, PacifiCare Health Systems. In 2003, PacifiCare began paying its California medical groups bonuses according to meeting or exceeding 10 clinical and service quality targets. The researchers examined the performance of California medical groups that were subject to pay-for-performance, and a comparison group in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington). Quality improvement reports were included from October 2001 through April 2004 issued to approximately 300 large physician organizations. There were three process measures of clinical quality: cervical cancer screening, mammography, and hemoglobin A1c testing.
The researchers found that clinical quality scores improved as follows: for cervical cancer screening, 5.3 percent for California vs. 1.7 percent for Pacific Northwest; for mammography, 1.9 percent vs. 0.2 percent; and for hemoglobin A1c testing, 2.1 percent vs. 2.1 percent. Compared with physician groups in the Pacific Northwest, the California network demonstrated greater quality improvement after the pay-for-performance intervention only in cervical cancer screening (a 3.6 percent difference in improvement). For all 3 measures, physician groups with baseline performance at or above the performance threshold for receipt of a bonus improved the least but garnered the largest share of the bonus payments.
"In the first year of its quality incentive program (QIP), the plan paid $3.4 million of a potential bonus pool of $12.9 million. Three quarters of the 172 physician groups eligible at some point during the year for the program received some funds from the bonus pool. We also observed that few groups reached a majority of targets, consistent with the low correlation in performance across clinical areas that has been observed in other studies. Physician groups whose performance was initially lowest improved the most, whereas physician groups that had previously achieved the targeted level of performance improved the least. Unlike quality improvement, which followed an inverse relationship to baseline performance, bonus dollars were garnered in direct proportion to baseline performance. Physician groups whose performance was above the bonus threshold at baseline captured 75 percent of bonus payments on average across the 3 quality domains we examined, despite their limited improvement," the authors write.