A large group of California physicians given financial incentives to improve the quality of medical care have begun to embrace an array of changes important to advancing quality, according to a study published in the March/April issue in Health Affairs.

Measures adopted by medical groups include speeding up adoption of information technology such as EMRs, more closely tracking the improvement of physician performance and sharpening institutional focus on quality, according to the authors.

"Physician groups are responding to pay-for-performance programs (P4P) by making practice changes and altering how they compensate physicians to reward quality, but health plans and purchasers say that those investments are not yet translating into substantial gains in quality," said the study's lead author Cheryl Damberg, a senior policy researcher at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.

The RAND Health study found that medical groups are providing some payments to individual physicians based on quality measures and physicians in the program are receiving more feedback about whether they are attaining quality goals.

P4P programs in healthcare have grown rapidly in recent years as a way to improve the quality of care delivered by doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers, according to the authors. Despite the adoption of the programs, there is little research about how well they work and what types of strategies work best.

The researchers evaluated a statewide P4P program launched by the California Integrated Healthcare Association in 2003. The initiative includes seven major California health plans and 225 physician groups which employ 35,000 physicians who care for 6.2 million people enrolled in commercial health maintenance organizations and point-of-service plans.

Under the P4P program, physician groups receive financial bonuses if they meet certain performance guidelines such as increasing the number of patients with diabetes who receive recommended blood tests. Other performance measures include improving patient experience with getting care and adopting healthcare IT capabilities. Between 2003 and 2007, the participating health plans paid $203 million in incentives to participating physician groups.

The study gathered data from surveys of 35 medical groups, the seven health plans and representatives from two employers that are involved in the P4P experiment.

Most of the medical groups surveyed suggested that the program's financial incentives--generally about $1,500 to $2,000 annually per physician--were too small to stimulate significant change among most doctors. They suggested the incentives needed to be two to five times higher  to achieve quality improvements.

Health plans thought increasing the incentives was a low priority because of the relatively small quality improvements attained thus far and questions about whether other types of investments might produce greater quality gains, according to the study.

Although there is some concern that P4P might cause physicians to drop patients who decline to follow recommendations, few reports of such events were received. More than two-thirds of the medical groups reported that the P4P program resulted in more positives than negatives.

Most physician organizations said they collected more bonus payments than they had spent to comply with the program, although six said it was barely enough to cover their costs. Twenty of the medical groups surveyed said the program had affected the behavior of their individual physicians, prompting them to embrace quality efforts, such as performing more-intensive outreach to patients.

The California HealthCare Foundation provided the grant in support of the study.