KPMG Survey: Is Health Care In Denial About Pay-For-Performance?

Health care stakeholders offer contradictory notions of the direction of their business. Most believe current business models are sustainable even though economic and legislative trends point in a different direction, according to a recent KPMG survey.

Asked about the sustainability of their industry’s current business model over the next five years, the largest group of respondents from each group answered “somewhat sustainable” from five possible answers ranging from “extremely sustainable” to “not sustainable.” Fifty-three percent of payers’ representatives, 43 percent of pharmaceutical companies’ and 40 percent of providers’ answered similarly.

The findings suggest that many healthcare organizations are working to sustain the volume-driven status quo despite a shift in healthcare toward pay for performance, according to Ed Giniat, KPGM’s health care and pharmaceuticals national sector leader. The most successful will recognize that times are changing.

Based on these results, researchers concluded that health care organizations from all sectors should develop short-term models in anticipation of revenue transformation and execute partnerships across sectors.

The KPMG survey was conducted between January-June 2012 and reflects responses from 104 health care system executives, 51 health plans executives and 54 pharmaceutical executives at leading organizations in the U.S. A webcast on the findings from the survey is available via the KPMG Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Institute (HPI). The KPMG Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Institute is a forum for healthcare business leaders to gain insight into emerging issues, consider approaches to help balance risk and controls and improve performance, and further explore the accelerating transformation within the health care industry, both domestically and globally.