Key Elements: Aligning Financial and Other Incentives

Aligning Incentives Case Examples

In 2007, the eHealth Initiative (eHI) presented its first annual Improving Healthcare Quality through Information and Information Technology Awards honoring eight organizations for demonstrating leadership and excellence in utilizing health information technology or health information exchange to drive improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare.

The awardees exemplify the principles and strategies identified in eHI's Blueprint: Building Consensus for Common Action. These organizations are models for how the use of health IT and health information exchange can support improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of health care. The organizations listed below represent practices in the Aligning Financial and Other Incentives section of the Blueprint.

Quality Health First and the Employers Forum of Indiana- Award Winner

Quality Health First is designed to provide physicians with reports, alerts, reminders and other information to physicians to help monitor patients' health and wellness, including the management of common, chronic diseases. It utilizes the existing infrastructure already in place through the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) and Regenstrief Institute's Indiana Network for Patient Care, which is one of the nation's largest and most respected clinical health repositories. This collaborative initiative is led by the IHIE and the Employers' Forum of Indiana, with participation from health insurers and healthcare providers in the nine county Indianapolis area. The Quality Health First program combines claims data with electronically submitted clinical data to determine a physician's quality across commercial health insurers, Medicaid, Medicare and the non-insured, providing standardized quality measures used by physicians and health insurers.

Mesa County Physicians IPA-Honorable Mention

The Mesa County Physicians IPA (MCPIPA) includes more than 75% of area physicians as members, and was a key visionary, founder, and funder of the collaborative Quality Health Network (QHN) initiative. With the MCPIPA incentive programs in place to facilitate and promote physician adoption, QHN has connected more than 85% of Mesa County area physicians to the network, routed 83% of results collected to electronic databases, with the average usage by the 330+ providers exceeding 30,000 requests for action by QHN servers each day.