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A new study conducted by RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization revealed that the financial incentives given to physicians to improve the quality of medical care stimulates changes in medical practices. And they also results in array of changes important to advancing quality of  patient care. According to findings published by The Journal Health Affairs, The course of actions taken by medical groups in this context includes more increased pace for adoption of information technology(IT) such as electronic medical records, more closely tracking the improvement of physician performance ,giving more importance to quality,etc..

The physician groups react positively towards the pay-for-performance programs by incorporating changes in pratice and also modifying the way they compensate physicians to reward quality. On the other hand, the health plans and purchasers says that these investments are not being converted in to remarkable changes in quality.  Cheryl Damberg, the lead author of the study and a senior policy researcher at RAND says that the real benefits of these programs may take more time to be realized and it is likely that investments in other quality efforts also may be required.

The RAND study discloses that medical groups are providing some kind of incentives or other payments to individual physicians on the basis of quality measures, and this also helps the physicians to get feedback on whether they are achieving goals or not. Though the Pay-for Performance in healthcare has grown increasingly in the recent past as an approach to improve the quality of patient care by by doctors, hospitals and other health care providers , there is only few research about how well they work and what types of strategies work best.

Another outcome of the study is most of the medical groups who had undergone the survey suggested that the program's financial incentives which on an average ranges between $1,500 to $2,000 annually per physician, were too small to up hold significant change among most doctors. They suggested the incentives needed to be two to five times higher in order to achieve quality improvements.

Health plans thought increasing the incentives was a low priority because of the relatively small quality improvements attained so far and questions about whether other types of investments might produce greater quality gains, according to the study. Though few events of dropping of patients by physicians who decline to follow recommendations had reported, More than two-thirds of the medical groups reported that the pay-for-performance program resulted in more positives than negatives.  The RAND study findings were gathered from surveys of 35 medical groups, the seven health plans and representatives from two employers that are involved in the pay-for-performance experiment.