Stephanie Bouchard, Managing Editor, Healthcare Finance News
Stephanie Bouchard is Managing Editor at Healthcare Finance News. She covers physician practices, ambulatory facilities and community care. Follow Stephanie on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.
$20B in incentives go to waste each year, says study
May 14, 2012
As the healthcare industry continues to move in the direction of using compensation incentives, a new analysis reveals that incentives as currently used are not an effective motivator for healthcare professionals and waste an estimated $20 billion in resources.
The 2012 Incentives for Health Professionals report released today by global sales and marketing consulting firm ZS Associates found that 75 percent of compensation incentives are so small or poorly communicated that they do not produce the work outcomes employers expect to get.
ZS Associates surveyed more than 4,500 healthcare providers and payers who use pay-for-performance incentives to evaluate how such incentives are being used in the healthcare industry and how effective they are at changing behaviors and meeting established goals.
[See also: Incentives, government needed to build national network.]
“[I]ncentives will probably be important to really drive change – that’s a tool that we have available – and we’re spending a lot of money on it, but the way, so far, that we’ve implemented them is not leading to the results that we might expect,” said Torsten Bernewitz, the report’s co-author and ZS Associates’ managing principal for the healthcare insurers and payers practice.
While healthcare employers are offering their doctors and nurses compensation incentives, many of those health professionals were not aware of the rewards being offered or were not able to distinguish incentive pay from base pay, ZS Associates’ researchers found. One-third of respondents who did know about the incentives did not find them motivating.
Bernewitz said that ZS Associates’ report on incentives should be seen as a warning signal to the healthcare industry that course corrections are needed if the use of incentives is to be as effective in healthcare as they are in other industries.
[See also: Incentives for EHR adoption on the rise.]
“Incentives are really important because reforming the healthcare system is about changing behaviors and incentives can be a very powerful tool to change behaviors,” Bernewitz said. “It helps that along if we do it in the right way.”
The report makes four suggestions for improving incentive efforts:
Sue Ann Jantz say: Health Care incentives
I wonder how many of these don't work because it interrupts the workflow of patient care?
For example, BCBS offered an incentive to get us to forumulary check, but it takes so long to get the info (from RxHub) back on our computers (and we have FAST connections) and we have so many people with dual coverage and there are so many BCBS plans, our providers often can't tell it would help to check. Most of the time, it is a "no answer" response if we check it.
Plus, making a provider a secretary to look things like this up is not using their time wisely, and in an area with a shortage of primary care providers, it just isn't worth it.