More Bad News on Pay-for-Performance
We examined the effects in 260 hospitals of a pay-for-performance demonstration project carried out by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in partnership with Premier Inc., a nationwide hospital system. We compared these results to those of a control group of 780 hospitals not in the demonstration project. The performance of the hospitals in the project initially improved more than the performance of the control group: More than half of the pay-for-performance hospitals achieved high performance scores, compared to fewer than a third of the control hospitals. However, after five years, the two groups’ scores were virtually identical.
Is any reader of this blog surpirsed at this result? if so speak now or forever hold your …. whatever.
A post from May 2 linked to an article explaining that only about one-third of hospital executives believe quality and patient outcomes are their primary concern.
Isn’t this consistent with the general truism that a positive finding tends to revert to the mean over time? I.e., initially, by chance, they found quality differences, but since the differences were just random fluctuations, after a few years the two groups looked the same. The same has been noted about initially encouraging drug trials.