The Medicare program's physician payment method is intended to control spending while ensuring beneficiary access to physician services, but there are signs that it may not be working. The physician's role in the health care delivery system as the primary source of information and treatment options, together with growing demand for services and the imperfect state of knowledge about appropriate...

We used data collected in the 2010 National Physician Survey and public payment data published in the Institute for Clinical and Evaluative Sciences report Payments to Ontario Physicians from Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care Sources 1992/93 to 2009/10 to estimate 2009/2010 net physician income from public payments for Ontario physicians by specialty. Incorporating overhead substantially af...

RESULTS: Our survey generated 404 responses. Regional distribution was as follows: West 9.75%; Midwest 27.8%; Northeast 24.3%; South 37.3%. 46.9% reported having been in practice for at least 20 years. 61.4% reported being in private practice; 26.1% reported having been in academia. Regarding practice size, 32.9% worked in a group practice (3 or more surgeons), 22.4% in partnership, and 23.4% i...

Value-based payments are rapidly replacing fee-for-service arrangements, necessitating advancements in physician practice capabilities and functions. The objective of this study was to examine potential differences among family physicians who are owners versus employed with respect to their readiness for value-based payment models. The authors surveyed more than 550 family physicians from the A...

BACKGROUND Aiming to align provider incentives toward improving quality and efficiency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is considering broader bundling of hospital and physician payments around episodes of inpatient surgery. Decisions about bundled payments would benefit from better information about how payments are currently distributed among providers of different perioperative...

informal payments to health care providers have been reported in many african, asian and european countries. this study aimed to investigate different aspects of these payments that are also known as under-the-table payments in iran.this is an in-depth interview-based qualitative study conducted on 12 purposively chosen clinical specialists. the interviewees answered 9 questions including the o...

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), of which the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) is a member journal, published the revised uniform conflict of interest declaration form on July 1, 2010 (1). ICMJE journals used the test version of the form during the last year, after the publication of its initial statement on the new form for declaring conflict of interest (2). The f...