Accounting for variation in the quality of care is a major challenge for the assessment of hospital cost performance. Because data on patients’ health improvement are generally not available, existing studies have resorted to inherently incomplete outcome measures such as mortality or...

The objective of this briefing is to summarise concisely the evidence on incentives that encourage providers of health care to follow guidance on best practice, particularly where that guidance requires the use of specific medicines or other health technologies. We define incentives broadly, to...

There has been long-standing interest in the use of incentives to encourage delivery of high-quality health care services at the lowest feasible cost. Although it is clear that health care professionals have intrinsic incentives to deliver high-quality care to patients, there are significant...