On May 19-20, 2005, Leapfrog, with the National Business Coalition on Health, co-hosted a successful workshop on two innovative pay for performance programs, spanning both inpatient and outpatient care delivery. The Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program (LHRP), which is focused on quality and efficiency in hospitals, and Bridges to Excellence (BTE), which is focused on quality in doctor offices, are specifically designed to trigger significant health care improvement for employee populations.

More than 180 enthusiastic employers, employer coalitions, health plans, benefits consultants and providers from around the U.S. attended the workshop. Workshop participants walked away with tools and general knowledge to customize and implement these two off-the-shelf programs in their respective markets. Besides the two program-specific toolkits (LHRP and BTE), which were created by Leapfrog and Bridges to Excellence with feedback from early implementers, workshop participants also received an Incentives and Rewards “101” toolkit outlining general questions that everyone should address before developing and implementing any incentive and reward or pay for performance program.  The toolkit is posted in the Incentives and Rewards Tools section of the Member Resource area of the Leapfrog Website.

Some of the common incentive and reward lessons learned from the workshop include:

• Look at health as a long-term investment in your businesses and community.
• Transparency alone is unlikely to improve health care; payment and marketshare must be tied to performance on standardized health care quality and efficiency metrics.
• Use a third party convener to help identify standardized measurement sets across all community-wide payers.
• Involve providers in the development of incentive and reward programs to build early support for the quality and efficiency metrics. 
• Identify meaningful incentives or rewards and share the methodology for calculating them openly.
• Establish the “business case”, but think beyond the financial return on investment (ROI) to other facets of the “business case” like improved health outcomes.
• Be flexible but stay the course.

To access the workshop home page and speaker presentations, click here.

If you have questions about the workshop, please contact us at 202-292-6813.