The objective is to compare the costs of providing the same level of quality. When resource-use and quality measures are juxtaposed, the resources used to provide the same level of quality can be compared.
Preventing bad outcomes for teens and their offspring was the impetus behind confidential care for reproductive health. Requiring parental involvement created an obstacle to the provision of necessary care.
Measuring outcomes alone is not the answer. There should be a way to reward the doctor for educating a patient about lifestyle modifications and then documenting that the care provided followed patient preferences.
The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
Donna T. Chen, MD, MPH, Lois Shepherd, JD, and Daniel M. Becker, MD, MPH, MFA
When most statutes about confidential treatment of adolescents were adopted, immunization against sexually transmitted infection was not anticipated, so the statutes contain no specific inclusion of such preventive measures.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.
Although measures of patient satisfaction are being used to improve patients’ hospital experience, implementing incentives based on these measures may be premature and have unintended consequences for care delivery.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(7):616-621. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.7.ecas3-1507.