Penn Medicine and Wharton School Professors and LDI Senior Fellows Kevin Volpp and David Asch have won the AcademyHealth Article-of-the-Year Award for their paper detailing a study of the effects of financial incentives on physicians and patients, the organization announced.

The award, which recognizes the year’s “best scientific work in the fields of health services research and health policy” was presented at AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting in Boston on June 28 .

Originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in November of 2015, the winning paper and its study were the latest to address the issue of how best to improve patient outcomes via financial incentives. The project’s different tack was to test pay-for-performance incentives on just doctors, just patients and then on doctors AND patients together.

16-member research team
Examining over 1,500 patients from three large health systems, the investigators determined that while neither physician-only incentives or patient-only incentives improved LDL cholesterol more than control, a system of incentives shared between patient and physician did. This is the first study to compare these incentive structures head to head. Volpp and Asch led a 16-member research team in the effort.

Volpp, MD, PhD, is the founding Director of LDI’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE), a Professor of Medicine and Vice Chairman for Health Policy of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and a Professor of Health Care Management at the Wharton School.

Asch, MD, MBA, is Executive Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, a Co-Director of the RWJF Clinical Scholars Program, and a Professor of both Medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and Health Care Management at the Wharton School.