Do pay-for-performance incentives improve quality of care?

Pay-for-performance incentives have been proposed as a method to improve the quality of care received by patients.

In the United Kingdom, primary care physicians receive financial rewards in return for providing high quality medical care.

In this study, which was conducted in London, Dr. Christopher Millett and colleagues investigated whether the introduction of a pay-for-performance incentive would improve the quality of care received by people with diabetes who smoke. Indeed, they found that introduction of this financial incentive for physicians improved the support for smoking cessation and was associated with a reduction in smoking prevalence among these patients.

In a related commentary, Levinson and Bell discuss the challenges of implementing pay-for-performance incentives in Canada.

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