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Incentivising improvements in health care delivery: a response to Adam Oliver

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2015

Tim Doran
Tim Doran*
Affiliation:
Professor of Health Policy, University of York, Heslington, York, UK
*
*Correspondence to: Tim Doran, Professor of Health Policy, University of York, Seebohm Rowntree Building, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK. Email: tim.doran@york.ac.uk
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Abstract

Financial and reputational incentives are increasingly common components in strategies to performance manage the medical profession. Judging the impacts of incentives is challenging, however, and the science of framework design remains in its infancy. Oliver’s taxonomy therefore offers a useful and timely guide to the approaches that are most likely to be successful (and unsuccessful) in the field of health care. The use of incentives to date has focused on process measures and a narrow range of outcomes, a pragmatic approach that has produced some substantial quality gains within the constraints of existing health care systems. Improvement of specific technical aspects of quality may, however, have been achieved at the expense of trust, cooperation and benevolence. Deficits in these indispensible virtues will undermine any attempt to performance manage the medical and allied professions.

Type
Special Section
Information
Health Economics, Policy and Law , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 351 - 356
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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