Trial reportJournal of health economics2020
In-kind incentives and health worker performance: Experimental evidence from El Salvador.
Trial report in Journal of health economics, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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
10 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Performance-based incentives and community health workers' outputs, a systematic review.Bulletin of the World Health Organization · 2021Pooled it
- Paying for performance to improve the delivery of health interventions in low- and middle-income countries.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Enhancing the antenatal care quality through incentivized routine health information system in Northwestern Ethiopia: a quasi-experimental study (2020-2021).BMC public health · 2025Article
- Effect of Performance-Based Nonfinancial Incentives on Data Quality in Individual Medical Records of Institutional Births: Quasi-Experimental Study.JMIR medical informatics · 2024Article
- Impact of health system governance on healthcare quality in low-income and middle-income countries: a scoping review.BMJ open · 2023Article
- Characterizing the implementation of performance management interventions in a primary health care system: a case study of the Salud Mesoamerica Initiative in El Salvador.Health policy and planning · 2023Article
- Article
- The Lancet Global Health Commission on financing primary health care: putting people at the centre.The Lancet. Global health · 2022Review
- Community health workers at the dawn of a new era: 8. Incentives and remuneration.Health research policy and systems · 2021Review
- Performance management in complex adaptive systems: a conceptual framework for health systems.BMJ global health · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We experimentally evaluated the effects of in-kind team incentives on health worker performance in El Salvador, with 38 out of 75 community health teams randomly assigned to performance incentives over a 12-month period. All teams received monitoring, performance feedback and recognition for their achievements allowing us to isolate the effect of the incentive. While both treatment and control groups exhibit improvements in performance measures over time, the in-kind incentives generated significant improvements in community outreach, quality of care, timeliness of care, and utilization of maternal and child health services after 12 months. Gains were largest for teams at the bottom and top of the baseline performance distribution. We find no evidence of results being driven by changes in reporting or by shifting away effort from non-contracted outcomes. These results suggest that in-kind team incentives may be a viable alternative to monetary or individual incentives in certain contexts.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.