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Health Works Collective > Business > Pay For Performance and HCAHPS
Business

Pay For Performance and HCAHPS

David Harlow
Last updated: March 24, 2012 8:30 am
David Harlow
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“There’s nothing better at incenting than money.”

Setting aside for a moment the mangling of the English language in this quote (see the full article on HCAHPS and P4P), we can probably agree that financial incentives are often a reasonable way to evoke desired behavior change.

“There’s nothing better at incenting than money.”

Setting aside for a moment the mangling of the English language in this quote (see the full article on HCAHPS and P4P), we can probably agree that financial incentives are often a reasonable way to evoke desired behavior change.

At the moment, we’re talking about providing care in a way that evokes favorable responses by patients on the HCAHPS questionnaires. Hospitals that have been attentive to patient satisfaction matters — as measured by HCAHPS — will be the winners; others, the losers, in the Medicare zero-sum-game of value-based hospital reimbursement.

We love, love, love metrics. We think that if we dole out financial rewards based on metrics, then health care will be improved. So we’ve developed about 1,000 quality measures (see National Quality Forum (NQF) measure list), and we ask providers to track performance on too many of them, on the theory that you cannot manage what you do not measure — an aphorism with truth to it, but folks, we have run amok with measures.

Since we don’t track all 1,000 all at once, we end up focusing on the dozen or so metrics in front of us at any given time, and other things fall off the table. 

I would love to see six or eight ur-measures that are predictive of quality across a broad spectrum of issues. I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this and related P4P issues with some leaders in the field, and offer for your listening (or reading) pleasure (well, OK, it’s subjective …) interviews I’ve done with Leah Binder of the Leapfrog Group, Don Berwick before he went to work for Uncle Sam and Cyndy Nayer & Wayne Burton of the Center for Health Value Innovation.

So what do you think about pay for performance?

What works? What doesn’t?

If you were king/queen of P4P, what would you do?

David Harlow
The Harlow Group LLC
Health Care Law and Consulting
 
  
 

 

TAGGED:pay for performance (p4p)
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By David Harlow
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DAVID HARLOW is Principal of The Harlow Group LLC, a health care law and consulting firm based in the Hub of the Universe, Boston, MA. His thirty years’ experience in the public and private sectors affords him a unique perspective on legal, policy and business issues facing the health care community. David is adept at assisting clients in developing new paradigms for their business organizations, relationships and processes so as to maximize the realization of organizational goals in a highly regulated environment, in realms ranging from health data privacy and security to digital health strategy to physician-hospital relationships to the avoidance of fraud and abuse. He's been called "an expert on HIPAA and other health-related law issues [who] knows more than virtually anyone on those topics.” (Forbes.com.) His award-winning blog, HealthBlawg, is highly regarded in both the legal and health policy blogging worlds. David is a charter member of the external Advisory Board of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network and has served as the Public Policy Chair of the Society for Participatory Medicine, on the Health Law Section Council of the Massachusetts Bar Association and on the Advisory Board of FierceHealthIT. He speaks regularly before health care and legal industry groups on business, policy and legal matters. You should follow him on Twitter.

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