And via HWR, young punk Jason Shafrin, at the Healthcare Economist has a just excellent article about why P4P isn’t enough and impicitly why we need budget and supply constraints to get health care costs under control. (Hint, it isn’t always possible to tell when the curve is flat or heading downhill).
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While P4P (or for that matter) “transparency” isn’t a silver bullet for all that ails healthcare, people (clinicians included) focus on what what they’re measured (and compensated) on.
All areas of medicine don’t have accepted practice guidelines. Many, important ones do. And the time it takes for what medicine knows to be common practice in delivery is way too long.
While some aspects of medical oncology, for example, don’t suit themselves to presently-developed guidelines, how many lives (and how much money) could be saved by doing relatively simple, and inexpensive things to diabetics, CHF patients, surgical patients (to prevent infections, etc.)?
P4P can get us part of the way there. Which is better than the status quo…
The rate of error in our medical system is the largest contributor to the high cost of healthcare. It costs America over 16 billion dollars each year to treat the two million hospital-acquired infections each year. There are 1.5 million injuries caused by medication error. There are 190,000 deaths caused each year by hospital error, and it costs billions to care for these people in their dying days. Investments in technology to prevent medication and diagnosis errors will save billions ultimately. Michael Townes Watson, author of America’s Tunnel Vision–How Insurance Companies’ Propaganda Is Corrupting Medicine and Law. http://www.StopMedicalError.com