The implementation of a physician incentive program often takes a "crawl, walk, run" approach.
A whitepaper from Valence Health explains the four-year transition the average provider organization should anticipate when implementing physician incentives.
Year 1 — Incent practices to share and input clinical data into the electronic medical record. The clinical quality and physician relations governing body should have already specified which data is important.
Year 2 — Incent physicians to begin using the system to access the clinical data. The key here is to compel physicians to look at their data in comparison to appropriate benchmarks and that of their peers. The sentinel effect — or tendency for human performance to improve when they know their behavior is being evaluated — "is real, and by itself can produce results," according to the whitepaper.
Year 3 — Incent physicians to comply with evidence-based guidelines for using EMRs and incorporating clinical information. For instance, physicians should acquire patient health indicators such as heart rates, weights, etc., and use them to enhance care.
Year 4 — At this stage, data can be used for a more results-oriented approach, where physicians are financially rewarded for complying with guidelines, patient health indicators and care decisions that contribute to improvements in those indicators over time.
The whitepaper was authored by R. Todd Stockard, who co-founded Valence Health in 1996.
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