Financial incentives can be used to reduce the use of health care resources, improve compliance with practice guidelines or achieve a general health target. It may be effective to use incentives in combination depending on the target set for a given health care programme.

No abstract

In an effort to control ambulatory care costs, regulatory practice guidelines (références médicales opposables or RMOs) were introduced by law in France in 1993. RMOs are short sentences, negatively formulated ("it is inappropriate to..."), covering medical and surgical topics, diagnosis, and treatment. Since their introduction, physicians who do not comply with RMOs can be fined. The fine is determined by a weighted combination of indices of harm, cost, and the number of violations. The impact of the RMO policy on physician practice has been questioned, but so far few evaluations had been performed. At the end of 1997, only 121 physicians had been fined (0.1% of French private physicians). The difficulty of controlling physicians, the large number of RMOs, and the lack of a relevant information system limit the credibility of this policy. The simultaneous development of a clinical guideline program to improve the quality of care and of a program to control medical practice can lead to a misunderstanding among clinicians and health policy makers. Financial incentives or disincentives could be used to change physician behavior, in addition to other measures such as education and organizational changes, if they are simple, well explained, and do not raise any ethical conflict. But these measures are dependent on the structure and financing of the healthcare system and on the socioeconomic and cultural context. More research is needed to assess the impact of interventions using financial incentives and disincentives on physician behavior.

The development of mutations associated with resistance to antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been shown to be a major cause of treatment failure in patients infected with HIV-1. These resistance mutations can be assessed by a genotyping test that probes for specific mutations within the HIV genome or sequences specific genes, at a cost $US500/test (2000 prices). The stated goal of HIV-1 genotyping is to target HIV therapy effectively. This, as shown in the preliminary research, should result in better clinical outcomes and a lower incidence of virological failure and may be associated with lower costs of treatment. Failure of ART may result in an increase in costs of at least $US250 per patient per month, as assessed in 1 study, with costs rising further as patients experience multiple virological failures. Therefore, there is an economic as well as a therapeutic premium on the prevention of ART failure. The actual economic cost of genotyping has been preliminarily explored in the context of the antiretroVIRal ADAPTation (VIRADAPT) trial, which found no significant difference in the 1-year treatment cost of patients with and without genotyping. There is some evidence of cost neutrality or savings with genotypic testing but it needs to be further explored within the context of carefully framed prospective trials.