Paying Doctors For A Job Well Done Benefits Patients, New Studies Find
Blood Pressure Check James Gathany, CDC/CDC Connects But the jury's still out, overall, whether paying doctors by their performance works. Some CEOs get paid by how much profit their companies make, and servers in the U.S. get rewarded through customer tips. Should doctors get paid the same way? Two new randomized trials, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that paying doctors according to how well they do their jobs could improve their patients' outcomes moderately. The studies come at a time when many experts are looking for new ideas for bringing down the U.S.' health care costs. The Affordable Care Act-the Obama Administration's health-care overhaul-already includes some pay-by-performance measures, for instance by tying hospitals' Medicare reimbursements to patient-satisfaction surveys. Right now, U.S. patients mostly pay depending on the services they get-so much for a checkup, so much for an MRI scan, and so on. This system...