Despite broad interest among employers and health plans, a nascent move to steer patients to physician specialists who score well on efficiency and quality measures is off to a slow start, according to a study released by the Center for Studying Health System Change.
So-called high-performance networks are a recent addition to the tools that health plans and purchasers are using in an attempt to curb costs and improve quality, the study found. The hope is that if these networks influence enough enrollees to shift to higher-performing providers, physicians losing market share might be motivated to improve efficiency and quality to better compete.
Based on interviews with about 20 organizations between May and September 2006, the study found that physicians typically responded to high-performance networks with skepticism, with the most common complaint being lack of communication from health plans. Physicians also had issues with the methodologies used to determine high-performance designations, questioning the data quality and whether sufficient sample sizes were used.
“High-performance networks have gained a toehold in such markets as Boston, Milwaukee, and Seattle only when large employers have been aggressive in pushing them,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, PhD, co-author of the study and president of HSC. Read the study.
