Health care incentive model offers collaborativ...(up paid a total Bonus amount of $75129 t...),Health

While the dollar amount is modest, the redistribution of payments engaged both groups in a key collaboration, Scanlon says. This initiative was an attempt to bring together hospitals and employers and see if they can come to an agreement on a program that benefits both parties by creating an incentive for improvement.

Hospitals were seeking recognition for their current investments in quality improvement and believed that additional resources would be needed to achieve superior improvement, he added. Employers felt that higher quality care should reduce health care costs, and additional payments should go only to superior performance. In post-study interviews, both groups felt the main benefit was sending a signal to large health plans about their desire for standardized and understandable performance factors and uniform rewards based on those factors, according to the Penn State researcher.

While the pilot study involved a small amount of money in reality, the program if applied to the billions of dollars spent in Medicare and Medicaid services could impact millions of dollars in hospital funding and employere reimbursements.

One goal of the study was to see if a different approach to health care funding was even possible, Scanlon says. Such a collaboration could pave the way for changes in how employers pay for health care and how hospitals are reimbursed, with stronger incentives and risk for both sides.

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