The UK’s NHS has an established pay for performance system, where primary care doctors are paid upwards of $200,000 annually. Now, some of their measures are coming under fire.
Doctors are being paid for keeping hospital admissions low, and reducing the amount of specialist consultations:
All Torbay’s 22 practices have signed up to a scheme under which a GP with an average referral rate can gain £59 for every patient not referred to hospital, up to a maximum eight per cent reduction in referrals . . .. . . GPs will receive an extra £1 for every patient on their list to pay for time to discuss patient cases with colleagues to see if there is an alternative to hospital referral. They will be paid a further £1 per patient on their list if they cut the number of referrals by an average of four per week.
The only effective means of saving money is to deny care. The NHS is taking this HMO-concept to the extreme by overtly paying doctors to do so.
Related posts:
- Medicare’s dismal pay for performance
- A referral to a specialist turns patients into currency
- Pay for performance follies
- Extreme lab values
- Does pay-for-performance work, and will it improve health care quality or patient outcomes?
- An NHS hospital, or extreme sports?
- Making pay for performance difficult
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{ 2 comments }
Is this a failure to treat or providing the right care? Is there enough information to say that the primary care physicians are corrupt and not providing the care people need? In pay for procedure systems, as we have in the USA, there is data to support that we certainly provide unneccessary, expensive and risky care.
it gets much worse kevin:
http://ferretfancier.blogspot.com/2008/10/sick-pcts-incentivising-patient-death.html
there are now cash incentives to reduce emergency referrals and emergency admissions
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