ArticleHealth affairs (Project Hope)2019
Paying Patients To Switch: Impact Of A Rewards Program On Choice Of Providers, Prices, And Utilization.
Article in Health affairs (Project Hope), 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Pricing and insurance networks in outpatient surgery markets.The American journal of managed care · 2025Observational
- Enhancing healthcare cost transparency: assessing implementation challenges, criticisms, and alternative solutions.Frontiers in health services · 2024Article
- Individualized Out-of-Pocket Price Estimators for "Shoppable" Surgical Procedures: A Nationwide Cross-Sectional Study of US Hospitals.Annals of surgery open : perspectives of surgical history, education, and clinical approaches · 2022Article
- Paying patients to use lower-priced providers.Health services research · 2022Article
- An Employer-Provider Direct Payment Program Is Associated With Lower Episode Costs.Health affairs (Project Hope) · 2021Article
- If reference-based benefit designs work, why are they not widely adopted? Insurers and administrators not doing enough to address price variation.Health services research · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Employers and insurers are experimenting with benefit strategies that encourage patients to switch to lower-price providers. One increasingly popular strategy is to financially reward patients who receive care from such providers. We evaluated the impact of a rewards program implemented in 2017 by twenty-nine employers with 269,875 eligible employees and dependents. For 131 elective services, patients who received care from a designated lower-price provider received a check ranging from $25 to $500, depending on the provider's price and service. In the first twelve months of the program we found a 2.1 percent reduction in prices paid for services targeted by the rewards program. The reductions in price resulted in savings of $2.3 million, or roughly $8 per person, per year. These effects were primarily seen in magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasounds, with no observed price reduction among surgical procedures.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.