Pay-for-performance for hospitals
Pay-for-performance initiatives - in which health care providers are rewarded with more funds for meeting clinical targets - have been adopted in the UK and Australia. The approach has been piloted in the US by the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which is responsible for government-sponsored health insurance. The first wave of implementation across the US is slated for 2013, when hospitals will have some revenues withheld and then returned if they meet clinical targets. However, pay-for-performance assumes that hospitals have the economic and human resources they need to meet the targets despite the current inequalities in resources in the health care system. Jan Blustein, of New York University, and colleagues tested this assumption in a new study published this week in PLoS Medicine by examining the association between local economic and human resources and hospital performance for two common heart conditions...