[afro-nets] Health Affairs: Quality Incentives And Disparities

["Kathleen Ford " <KFord@projecthope.org>]

Health Affairs: Quality Incentives And Disparities
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P4P And Quality Reporting: How They Could Worsen Disparities, And What To Do About It

Pay-for-performance (P4P) and public quality-reporting programs offer the potential to increase the quality of health care overall, but they threaten to actually decrease quality for minority and low-income patients in the process. In an article published today on the Health Affairs Web site, Larry Casalino and Arthur Elster explain first how current incarnations of P4P and reporting programs for physicians could worsen health care quality disparities, and second how these rapidly proliferating "external incentives" might be revamped to avoid this result. The article focuses on P4P and public reporting programs for physicians, but similar points apply to external incentives aimed at other types of health care providers, such as hospitals, say Casalino, an assistant professor of health studies at the University of Chicago, and Elster, director of the Division of Medicine and Public Health at the American Medical Association.

You can read the article by Casalino and Elster at
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.26.3.w405

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Kathleen Ford 
mailto:KFord@projecthope.org