Flying in the face of the government’s national pay-for-performance initiatives, new research finds that hospital incentives failed to achieve their goal of improving patient outcomes, specifically, 30-day mortality rates. The New England Journal of Medicine study published yesterday found little evidence pay-for-performance programs actually helped keep patients alive longer.

‘It really didn’t move the needle very much on patient outcomes,’ study lead author Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Reuters. ‘There was no evidence that patient outcomes got better under this different financing scheme.’

Researchers looked at 252 hospitals participating in the Medicare Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID), a partnership between the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and nonprofit hospitals, compared to other 3,363 nonparticipating hospitals. Hospitals in the top 20 percentile earned 1 or 2 percent bonuses in Medicare payments, while those in the bottom 20 percent were penalized 1 percent to 2 percent.

However, mortality rates were similar regardless of whether hospitals were in the bonus program. The mortality rates for patients who had heart attacks, congestive heart failure or pneumonia, or who underwent coronary-artery bypass surgery dropped slightly in both groups.

But mortality rates aren’t the only goal of the Premier demonstration, according […]