Rewarding Healthy Behaviors--Pay Patients for Performance

Rewarding healthy behaviors--pay patients for performance.

Despite a considerable investment of resources into pay for performance, preliminary studies have found that it may not be significantly more effective in improving health outcome measures when compared with voluntary quality improvement programs. Because patient behaviors ultimately affect health outcomes, I would propose a novel pay-for-performance program that rewards patients directly for a...

Rewarding Behaviors

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a very popular tool for decision theoretic planning (DTP), partly because of the welldeveloped, expressive theory that includes effective solution techniques. But the Markov assumption—that dynamics and rewards depend on the current state only, and not on history— is often inappropriate. This is especially true of rewards: we frequently wish to associate rew...

Rewarding Prosecutors for Performance

Prosecutorial discretion is a problem that most scholars attack from the outside. What forces should constrain or guide prosecutors to pursue the right numbers and types of cases, rank them well, treat them equally, behave ethically, invest appropriate effort, and seek fitting punishments? Most scholars favor external institutional solutions, such as ex ante legislation or ex post judicial and ...

Pioneering Pay-for-Quality: Lessons from the Rewarding Results Demonstrations

This article reports six overarching lessons learned from seven pioneering initiatives in the pay-for-quality (P4Q) movement. These lessons relate to the specific design and implementation challenges sponsors of P4Q programs can expect. The lessons are: (1) P4Q can prioritize providers' quality goals, (2) provider engagement is difficult, (3) P4Q escalates concerns for data accuracy and validit...

Pay for performance.