incentive

Following up on the deal which won physicians a reprieve from the dreaded 5 percent Medicare fee cutback, two Senators have jointly introduced a bill including Medicare quality reporting for physicians. CMS will begin discussing possible quality measures as soon as January 2007, but doctors will not begin to report quality data in 2008, when final measures are expected to be in place. …

By one school of thought, multimillionaire corporate executives have no business making healthcare decisions for the rank and file employees who report to them. After all, they live in a much different world, with generous policies of their own and sometimes, reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses, while employees with tiny incomes are facing steadily growing health costs. Some critics suggest that individual patients should have far more power in making health purchasing decisions …

It's tough to avoid the temptation to do more tests when testing pays a lot more than hands-on care, notes Wall Street Journal columnist and family physician Dr. Benjamin Brewer. With an office visit paying an average of $69, but a hospital-based colonoscopy paying $478 (with no office overhead), Brewer has all of the incentive in the world to order colonoscopies rather than build relationships with patients. Unfortunately, what's good for business can be bad for …

With the growth of transparency initiatives, health plans have a powerful incentive to publicize individual providers' prices. But most providers wouldn't want them to publish pricing data unexpectedly. If pricing data goes public without providers knowing, it could leave them unprepared for questions that patients might pose, or make them look bad by presenting figures out of context, notes an article on HealthLeadersMedia.com. Today, it's important to go over managed care …

Want to make sure that skilled physician leaders stick with your practice? An article in the Physician Compensation Report outlines several financial options that help to retain doctors with strong leadership skills, including:

• Offer a stipend for managerial work above and beyond their clinical practice
• Offer a variable stipend--perhaps 5 to 7 percent of net income--as an incentive to grow the practice
• Make sure that in a productivity-based system, …

The $66 million dollar question: How to make pay for performance work
Dr. Michael Belman, staff VP and Medical Director with WellPoint division Blue Cross of California, discusses how his company developed its pay-for-performance program, which recently awarded its contracted medical groups $66 million in incentive pay.
How long has your current pay for performance program been in the works?
First, bear in mind that 99 percent of our HMO network is through our delegated medical groups.  We give the group a full capitation for the professional risk, though the hospital risk stays with us.
Anyway, we had a program in the 90s aimed at our HMO product which offered a small incentive related to how doctors managed chronic disease, health, and how they managed grievances and appeals.  But the money wasn’t very much.

It looks as though there will be no repeat of the flu vaccine shortages of the past few years. Vaccine makers say they are on track to produce at least 100 million doses of flu vaccine in time for next year's flu season. That's far better than the 86 million doses that producers managed for the 2005-2006 season. The estimates came as vaccine manufacturers, public health officials and influenza experts met in Chicago for the National Influenza Vaccine Summit. Officials say they want to …

Tenet Healthcare said that it has reached an agreement with federal officials to settle charges that it used kickback payments to doctors to encourage them to refer patients. The hospital chain will pay a fine of $21 million. The Dallas-based provider has also agreed to either sell or shut down Alvarado Medical Center. Federal prosecutors had charged that the hospital improperly used payments to physician groups as an incentive to encourage them to refer patients. Tenet shares rallied up …

A $50 million electronic medical record pilot program sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts is experimenting in three local communities: Brockton, North Adams and Newburyport. The project is being "closely watched" by health officials around the country, according to the Boston Globe. The fact that an insurer is footing the bill is considered a major plus by many observers. In many initiatives physicians are expected to pay for implementing EMRs and deal with …

It is probably a longshot to ever pass, but legislation introduced on Monday by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would authorize $4.5 billion in grants to healthcare providers to adopt interoperable technology. Grants would be capped at $1 million for hospitals and $15,000 per physician in group practices (the commonly assumed per physician cost of an EMR. The bill would also allow hospitals and other healthcare companies to write-off IT investments, a serious incentive.

- see this story from Health Data Management