(Reuters: New York) -- A program to pay hospitals bonuses for hitting key performance measures, or dock them if they miss, failed to improve the health outcomes of patients, according to a large, long-term study.

The study could lead to a reexamination of financial incentives in health care, as policy makers seek ways to reward results rather than paying doctors and other providers for each service they provide, such as a diagnostic test.

Such an incentive program for hospitals is a key provision of the U.S. health care overhaul law that was challenged last week before the Supreme Court.

The study looked at pay-for-performance incentives similar to those in the law and found no evidence that the program helped more patients live longer. It was published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“It really didn’t move the needle very much on patient outcomes,” says Ashish Jha, M.D., a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “There was no evidence that patient outcomes got better under this different financing scheme.”

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