| Hot Topic: Physician Payment and Physician Behavior: A Complex Interaction |
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| This month, Congress was in familiar territory with an approaching deadline to cut or delay cuts in Medicare payments to physicians. A couple of weeks before a December 1 deadline, Congress voted to delay for one month a 23 percent reduction in Medicare payments to physicians. Last week, Senate leaders came to an agreement to implement another reprieve on scheduled fee cuts. The one-year delay will be financed through changes to the subsidy provisions associated with the insurance exchanges. Yet
the overriding issue, how they will ultimately craft a new payment system—one that properly aligns incentives, improves the quality of care and begins to curtail cost growth—remains unresolved.
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| HCFO Releases a New Findings Brief Examining the Effect of Pay for Performance on Hospitals that Serve Poor Patients |
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| What is the effect of pay for performance on hospitals that serve poor patients? Ashish Jha, M.D., M.P.H., at the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues studied 251 hospitals that participated in the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration against a national sample of 3017 hospitals. They found no evidence that financial incentives widened the gap in performance between hospitals that serve poor patients and other hospitals.
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| New Data for Researchers |
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| The National Center for Health Statistics released a new report on a comparison of home health and hospice care agencies. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality released two reports on preventable hospitalizations for acute and chronic conditions, and emergency department visits for adults in community hospitals.
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| Grantee Spotlight: Ashish Jha, M.D., M.P.H. |
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| Ashish Jha, M.D., M.P.H., was the principal investigator on a HCFO-sponsored grant that examined the impact of pay-for-performance (P4P) incentives to improve quality in hospitals that care for minority or other underserved populations.
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| New Grantee Publications |
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| News and Events |
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Five articles resulting from HCFO-supported work were nominated for the RWJF Year in Research. Vote today!
Call for Participation in
Payment Preferences Survey
Three European Universities are currently organizing a survey study across the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. Healthcare policy makers, managers, researchers and physicians are invited to participate in the survey and express their preferences for health care payment systems and payment effects. HCFO is supporting this effort by providing access to the survey. Those wishing to participate will find more details here.
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