Objective: In Germany, there is little transparency when it comes to quality of care of national health care providers. The population has hardly any opportunity to identify well-performing health-care providers. Therefore, the emerging quality improvement initiative "Pay for Performance (P4P)" developed in California, USA is examined with regard to an implementation into the German health care sector. This program wants to achieve higher levels of health care by setting both goal-oriented financial and non-financial incentives. Therefore, performance-based payment is combined with Public Reporting of the measured quality of care. As people can be influenced by the information provided, Public Reporting is supposed to have a positive effect on the quality of treatment.
Methodology: Published data to the American population will be highlighted as well as indications and examinations included in the P4P program. Also, it will be shown how the performance of health care providers is determined.
Results: Since published performance results can be considered not only for a specific indication but also as a whole, patients have the opportunity to choose a well-performing health-care provider, according to their specific requirements. Thus, Public Reporting might be regarded as an effective method in order to improve the quality of care provided by health-care providers.
Conclusion: Public Reporting in P4P is already conducted in a differentiated but also in a broad context. In the development of this key success element, many stakeholders have been involved, including health-care providers. So, the presented way of Public Reporting can be regarded as a business case to learn from with regard to more transparency in the German health-care sector.