A fixed flat monthly payment to physicians is a vulgar method to compensate a professional effort. At some initial stages of the career, it may work. As far as experience and knowledge improves results, than some adjustments are needed. In general the publicly funded health system is not able to change the initial stage and remains with more or less the same approach of low-powered incentives. This may work for some individuals, but not for all of them.
Paying on a fee-for service it creates strong incentives to boost volume, and paves the way to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Privately funded health care is still using mostly this high-powered approach and it is also not able to reform.
Alternative methods of compensating physicians have been described recently in an interesting report. Forget for a while that it is based on the US health system. These are the seven options:
APM #1: Payment for a High-Value Service
APM #2: Condition-Based Payment for a Physician’s Services
APM #3: Multi-Physician Bundled Payment
APM #4: Physician-Facility Procedure Bundle
APM #5: Warrantied Payment for Physician Services
APM #6: Episode Payment for a Procedure
APM #7: Condition-Based Payment Food for thought. Something should done to go beyond fee-for service. And do not forget it, changing incentives without any organizational alignment or reform may drive to surprises and poor performance.
PS. Just the opposite to us, NHS expands private care . A controversial trend.
