miércoles, 9 de agosto de 2017

Small Cash Incentives Can Encourage Primary Care Visits By Low-Income People With New Health Care Coverage

Small Cash Incentives Can Encourage Primary Care Visits By Low-Income People With New Health Care Coverage
AHRQ News Now

Study: Incentive Payments Encourage Primary Care Visits for Newly Covered Patients

Patients who are given a small cash incentive payment are more likely to see a primary care provider within six months of gaining insurance coverage than patients who are not, a new AHRQ-funded study showed. The study, published this week in Health Affairs, may demonstrate a successful method of encouraging early and regular contact with a primary care provider. In the study, researchers gave approximately 1,200 newly insured patients in Virginia varying small cash incentives (up to $50) to visit an assigned primary care provider. They found that approximately 75 percent of patients who received incentives visited their provider within 6 months, compared with 68 percent of those who only received payment for completing a baseline survey. By contrast, just 61 percent of the approximately 400 patients given no incentive visited their provider in that time.The authors concluded that cash incentives may be a cost-effective way to steer low-income, newly insured patients toward primary care, which could result in improved health outcomes and lower costs.  Access the abstract.

Small Cash Incentives Can Encourage Primary Care Visits By Low-Income People With New Health Care Coverage

  1. David Neumark2
+Author Affiliations
  1. 1Cathy J. Bradley (cathy.bradley@ucdenver.edu) is associate director for population health sciences, University of Colorado Cancer Center, and a professor in the Department of Health Systems Management and Policy, University of Colorado, in Denver.
  2. 2David Neumark is a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine.
  1. *Corresponding author

Abstract

In a randomized controlled trial, we studied low-income adults newly covered by a primary care program to determine whether a cash incentive could encourage them to make an initial visit to a primary care provider. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four groups: three groups whose members received $10 to complete a baseline survey during an interview and who were randomized to incentives of $50, $25, or $0 to visit their assigned primary care provider within six months after enrolling in the study; and a nonincentivized control group not contacted by the research team. Subjects in the $50 and $25 incentive groups were more likely to see a primary care provider (77 percent and 74 percent, respectively), compared to subjects in the $0 incentive group (68 percent). The effects of the intervention were about twice as large when we compared the proportions of subjects in the $50 and $25 incentive groups who visited their providers and the proportion in the nonincentivized group (61 percent). Cash incentive programs may steer newly covered low-income patients toward primary care, which could result in improved health outcomes and lower costs.

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