Objectives

The purpose of this study was to determine whether reimbursement in direct proportion to expected therapeutic benefit is capable of improving the utilization and cost of health care.

Background

The benefit associated with a particular medical or surgical treatment varies widely from patient to patient.

Nevertheless, payment to the provider of the treatment is essentially invariant under the current fee-for-service system.

Under an alternative fee-for-benefit strategy, empiric data are used to construct a multivariable model to predict the expected benefit to an individual patient from a particular health care service on the basis of conventional clinical descriptors.