Bridges to Excellence (BTE) has over 5 years of national pay-for-performance (P4P) experience with a mission that continues to focus on the importance of P4P as a catalyst for change and an important signal for practice re engineering and market reform. BTE's experience has definitively shown that incentives can spark a fundamental shift to focus on results-based medicine. In fact, a key finding from the last five years has been how powerful self-assessment on the part of the physicians and practices has been in initiating positive changes in practice care patterns and systems. The Physician Office Link (POL) program is focused on promoting the office practice's use of information systems to enhance the quality of patient care. The number of recognized POL physicians has grown from a hand full in 2002 to over 2,000. This adds up to savings for the purchasers, improved systems for the practices, better care for patients and a win for the community.

In this audio-conference, participants will learn about the results of recent empirical research that evaluated the impact of P4P on practice reengineering. This research was conducted in 4 diverse communities: Minnesota, Washington DC, Massachusetts and Upstate NY. Important and revealing common themes emerged, specifically themes that are important to inform the medical home initiative, and that highlight the importance that there be a positive financial impact to all stakeholders and a business case for reengineering. In addition, participants will learn how to use a collaborative P4P approach to send the right incentive signals to counter the bad incentive signals prevalent in health care today.

• Learn why adoption and use of HIT in physician offices results in higher quality and lower cost of care
• Hear directly from today's "patient-centered medical homes"
• Understand why reengineering the processes of care in physician practices takes time but yields good results
• Find out why HHS has announced a new initiative to create incentives for physicians to adopt EMRs
• Gain ideas on how you can construct a P4Q/P4P program that will pay off dividends far into the future