Incitation Financière à l'Amélioration de la Qualité (IFAQ) pour les établissements de santé français: Résultats de l'expérimentation (2012-2014) [Financial Incentive to Improve Quality (IFAQ) developed within French hospitals: Results for the first experiment (2012-2014)]

The French Ministry of Health and the National Authority for Health launched an experiment of a Financial Incentive to Improve Quality (IFAQ) within 222 acute care hospitals, in June 2012. A working group made of representatives from hospital federations and governmental agencies was created on purpose. The research team COMPAQH (EA7348 Healthcare management Research-EHESP), was in charge of the program design and development. IFAQ was modeled after the Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program, which was implemented previously, in the US. The objective was to design a model that would rank the participating hospitals according to the results obtained to a set of indicators, and award bonuses to the highest performers. The model was intended to account for both improvement and achievement. It selected quality and safety indicators that were already mandatory to collect, and disclosed publicly, as well as a measure of the level of use of information technologies. Of the 222 hospitals enrolled 93 of them were rewarded. The incentive size was calculated as a portion of their annual budget. Finally, IFAQ diverged from VBP in terms of metric choice, calculation of the score, and incentive structure.