Rewards of up to US$150,000 per year will be available to members of a consortium of health care firms formed by the vendors and unveiled last week. The group, called the Silicon Valley Pay for Performance Consortium, includes the three founding IT vendors plus Camino Medical Group Inc., Kaiser Permanente, Palo Alto Medical Clinic, Sutter Medical Group Inc. and other large medical practices in Northern California.
All of the health care providers have agreed to encourage their physicians to use electronic medical record (EMR) technology and other IT clinical systems.
The pay-for-performance program rewards health care firms that use systematic processes and health information technology to improve the quality of care. To qualify for the rewards, the IT systems must meet standards unveiled last week by the Washington-based National Committee for Quality Assurance, a nonprofit group that accredits health care organizations.
Robert Pearl, executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group Inc. in Oakland, said his medical group -- the largest in the U.S., with 6,000 physicians -- quickly agreed to participate in what he called the first pay-for-performance initiative that focuses on the use of IT.
"Advanced IT systems are the only way to provide the highest-quality care and the best service for patients," he added.
Permanente is one year into a $4 billion, two-and-a-half-year project to replace a 10-year-old proprietary EMR system with a package from Epic Systems Corp. in Madison, Wis. By midyear, the system will hold the medical data of 2 million patients, Pearl said.
The goal of the consortium's founders is to accelerate the adoption of EMRs and the use of automated decision-support tools, said Jeff Rideout, Cisco's corporate medical director and vice president of its Internet business solutions group for health care.
The idea for the collaboration was born when the three firms started working together last fall on a project for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop a prototype of a national IT infrastructure to support the use of EMRs nationwide, he said.
Rideout said he expects the program to ensure quality health care for employees of the three vendors, many of whom are customers of member health care providers.
"We're doing this first and foremost to help people to adopt technology, but [also] with the belief that this will lead to improved outcomes and a better experience for our employees," he said.
The rewards will be based on the use of IT in documentation of treatment procedures, care management and patient education. The vendors will not recommend specific hardware or applications to meet the criteria, Rideout said.
Over the long term, the vendors plan to expand the consortium in locations where they have large concentrations of employees and invite smaller physician practices to join, he added.
IDC analyst Scott Tiazkun agreed that the collaborative is the first pay-for-performance initiative to focus on IT. But he questioned whether it can spur the use of EMRs by small physician practices.
"The financial incentives offered are a way to reward the 'haves' rather than creating electronic health record opportunities for the 'have-nots,'" Tiazkun said.