Give Doctors Pay-For-Performance?

Pay-for-performance may benefit doctors who care for very sick 06/01/09. Physicians who treat patients with multiple health problems will fare well under pay-for-performance, which bases physician reimbursement on the quality of care provided, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston in a report in the current issue of the journal Circulation.

"Pay-for-performance raises a lot of fears and assumptions that the reimbursement will not be fair toward doctors who care for the sickest patients," said Dr. Laura A. Petersen (http://www.hsrd.houston.med.va.gov/health-policy/petersenl.htm), the study's lead author and director of the Houston VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence and an associate professor of medicine at BCM. "What we found was that doctors do a good job of taking care of a lot of complex conditions, even better than they think they do."

In their study, the researchers identified 141,609 patients with high blood pressure in a VA database. Of these 22,595 had no other serious health conditions; 70,098 had conditions that could be related to the high blood pressure (concordant), 12,283 other health conditions not related to high blood pressure (discordant) and 36,633 had both. Baylor College of Medicine via Eurekalert!