Of particular concern—for both inpatient and outpatient physicians—is the fate of high-risk and unassigned patients. According to SHM’s 2005-2006 “Bi-Annual Survey on the State of the Hospital Medicine Movement” (www.hospital medicine.org), 96% of hospitalists are involved in the care of unassigned patients, and, in general, one of the strengths of hospital-based physicians should be their relative familiarity with the acute problems of patients who are older and of those with concomitant morbidities. Yet these are precisely the patient groups that are not well served by typical P4P measurements.
The potential for P4P incentives to create disparities in patient care among different patient groups and diseases is one of the prime concerns in the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs’ recent opinion for the AMA on P4P programs.3 The care of older patients, for instance, because of their own choices and due to frequency of comorbidities, may well come up short in performance measures designed for individuals who have a single disease.
This is not just a policy problem because P4P is not only unlikely to adequately address the ethical concerns of equitable care to these groups, it could exacerbate the vulnerability of these populations by creating a disincentive to provide care.4 A recent publication describing reports of cardiac surgeons turning away high-risk patients after “CABG report cards” became publicly available suggests that when given the option at least some physicians may indeed change their behavior when quality information is being collected and reported.5 Ironically, a system that incentivizes doctors to avoid the highest-risk patients could worsen—rather than improve—the overall quality of care.
Hospitalists may not be as sensitive to these pressures as surgeons or outpatient physicians, especially given the hospitalist’s limited flexibility in “choosing” patients. Care of unassigned patients may be a contractual obligation for which a hospitalist is paid by the hospital (which may face its own pressures in this area). And lower-risk referrals from outpatient physicians may “compensate” for the occasional complex patient.
Hospitalists are generally “need-based” practitioners who legally and ethically may not have the option to refuse care without risking patient abandonment. Yet the fact that hospitalists take on such patients may make their performance scores inferior to even non-hospital-based doctors—a difficult position to be in if one’s group receives payments from the hospital with an expectation of superior performance. Hospitalists in particular must consider whether or not insurance companies and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) could really accommodate all possible confounders in a risk-adjustment model to offset the nature of their patients. While the ethical choice might be for hospitalists simply to refuse to participate in P4P, citing multiple conflicts of interest, there is no clear indication regarding how “optional” these programs will be as they become increasingly prevalent, presenting yet another ethical issue.
Further, Medicare’s current P4P system for hospitals is directed at just five conditions, only two of which (congestive heart failure and pneumonia) are likely to fall within a hospitalist’s realm. But the list of common diagnoses under the hospitalist’s umbrella is, of course, much larger, including thromboembolism, pyelonephritis, COPD, cirrhosis, and sepsis. The data that exists for compliance with recommended care for some of these conditions (e.g., COPD) suggests that there may be substantial variability.6
But if hospitals base their support for hospitalist programs on their performance within a few CMS diagnoses, the effect on care for and development of appropriate guidelines and resources toward many other conditions may suffer. Already, hospital discharge forms are pre-printed with checkboxes for an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor prescription for congestive heart failure and counseling for smoking cessation. The (unethical) implication is that some diagnoses are more valuable than others, and that physician energies may be inequitably distributed—whether consciously or not. It is difficult to see how P4P could encompass standards for every patient condition, or how hospitals and providers could avoid focusing resources on those conditions that are more closely scrutinized by their payers.