Financial incentives and professionalism: another fine mess.

Physicians, professionalism and organizational efforts to improve quality--a systems perspective.

The issue of physician professionalism has grown in importance in recent years, in part because of perceptions that our rapidly changing health care system and the incentives associated with managed care threaten professionalism. Inherent conflicts between physician professionalism and the financial and non-financial incentives used by health care organizations in quality management may be unde...

Take the Money and Run: The Challenges of Designing and Evaluating Financial Incentives in Healthcare; Comment on “Paying for Performance in Healthcare Organisations”

Many countries are turning their attention to the use of explicit financial incentives to drive desired improvements in healthcare performance. However, we have only a weak evidence-base to inform policy in this area. The research challenge is to generate robust evidence on what financial incentives work, under what circumstances, for whom and with what intended and unintended consequences.

When incentives and professionalism collide.

As Jin Ma and colleagues observe, an unfettered market approach in China has reduced access to care, increased patients' financial burden, and reduced emphasis on prevention and may have caused declines in quality and outcomes. A major driving force was that perverse incentives altered physicians' behavior toward self-interest at the expense of patients, even where professional ethics dictated ...

Financial Incentives: Only One Piece of the Workplace Wellness Puzzle; Comment on “Corporate Wellness Programs: Implementation Challenges in the Modern American Workplace”

In this commentary, we argue that financial incentives are only one of many key components that employers should consider when designing and implementing a workplace wellness program. Strategies such as social encouragement and providing token rewards may also be effective in improving awareness and engagement. Should employers choose to utilize financial incentives, they should tailor them to ...

Do Financial Incentives Increase Doctors’ Willingness to Publish Research? – A Pilot Study of 21 Junior Doctors