Hospital pay incentives fail to help patients: study

Such an incentive program for hospitals is a key provision of the U.S. healthcare overhaul law that is being challenged this week before the Supreme Court. The study looked at pay-for-performance incentives similar to those in the law and found no evidence that the program helped more patients live longer. It was published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. "It really didn't move the needle very much on patient outcomes," said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the study's lead author. "There was no evidence that patient outcomes got better under this different financing scheme."