April 23, 2012     

Will U.S. "Pay for Performance" Make a Difference for Hospitals? [Article/Audio]

The April edition of the New England Journal for Medicine features an essay co-written by Jan Blustein, professor of health policy and medicine at NYU Wagner, on the prospects for success of hospital “pay for performance.” The new payment mechanism will be implemented across U.S. acute care hospitals this October under the Medicare Hospital Value-Based (VBP) program.

Paying U.S. acute care hospitals for improved performance is based on the notion that money changes behavior.  “Accumulating evidence, however, raises serious doubts about whether the program will improve value in health care,” Professor Blustein writes with Andrew Ryan, a public health scholar at the Weill Cornell Medical College in the essay “Making the Best of Hospital Pay for Performance.”  The piece, newly-published online and available in print April 26, explores how we can learn from the program as it unfolds, and how it can be improved, and includes an audio interview with Dr. Blustein.

Dr. Blustein’s research on this topic appears separately in the April edition of the journal Health Affairs. In this scholarly article, coauthored with Ryan and other experts in public policy and medicine, she examines the impact of the incentive’s piloted use by Massachusetts to address racial and ethnic disparities in hospital care. The research raises questions about whether "pay for performance" for hospitals is an effective method for stemming disparities.

In addition to her role as professor of health policy and medicine at Wagner, Blustein co-directs New York University’s NIH-funded TL1 PhD program in Clinical and Translational Research, and is the founding director of the IRB Initiative, a resource for issues involving federal regulation of human-subjects research. She holds an MD degree from the Yale School of Medicine and a Ph.D. from Wagner.








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