Pay for Performance in California's Workers' Compensation Medical Treatment System

An Assessment of Options, Challenges, and Potential Benefits

Barbara O. Wynn, Melony E. Sorbero

Expert InsightsPublished Jul 1, 2008

Over the past few years, nonoccupational group health-insurance programs and health plans have implemented initiatives to improve the quality and efficiency of care through incentive programs, typically called “pay for performance,” or P4P. In addition, Medicare program administrators are evaluating how P4P incentives might be incorporated into Medicare payment systems. This paper assesses the options, challenges, and potential benefits of adopting P4P incentives for physician services in California's workers' compensation program. It offers three models that might be able to surmount the challenges, provided that the stakeholders have the commitment and trust to work through the design issues and allow the P4P program to evolve over time. P4P alone will not be sufficient to drive value-based medical care provided to injured workers; rather, it should be considered as part of a multipronged set of strategies designed to increase the efficient delivery of high-quality care that enables rapid and sustained return to work.

Topics

Document Details

  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web-Only
  • Year: 2008
  • Pages: 68
  • Document Number: OP-229-CHSWC

Citation

Chicago Manual of Style

Wynn, Barbara O. and Melony E. Sorbero, Pay for Performance in California's Workers' Compensation Medical Treatment System: An Assessment of Options, Challenges, and Potential Benefits. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008. https://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP229.html.
BibTeX RIS

The research described in this paper was prepared for the Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation, California Department of Industrial Relations, and was conducted by the RAND Institute for Civil Justice and RAND Health, divisions of the RAND Corporation.

This publication is part of the RAND occasional paper series. RAND occasional papers were products of RAND from 2003 to 2013 that included informed perspectives on a timely policy issue, discussions of new research methodologies, essays, papers presented at a conference, and summaries of work in progress.

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited; linking directly to this product page is encouraged. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

Version Note

This publication supersedes a previous version published in 2007 (WR-512-ICJ).