The Practice Incentive Program (PIP) is a key driver to quality care in the general practice sector. PIP is aimed at supporting general practice activities that encourage improvements in quality care, enhance capacity and improve access and health outcomes for patients.
The PIP Quality Improvement (QI) Incentive will continue to build on this important work further strengthening quality improvement in primary health care. As announced in the 2017-18 Federal Budget measure Quality Improvement in General Practice, the design of the new QI Incentive will support general practice to better understand the quality of care being delivered, leading to better outcomes for patients.
It is important that this works well for the sector. More time is needed to ensure that general practices have adequate opportunity to prepare and that any implementation issues are identified and appropriately addressed. For this reason implementation of the PIP QI will now occur on 1 May 2019.
The changed time frame will mean that the following five incentives which were to cease on 1 May 2018 will continue through to 30 April 2019.
The five incentives are:
- Asthma Incentive
- Quality Prescribing Incentive
- Cervical Screening Incentive
- Diabetes Incentive, and
- General Practitioner Aged Care Access Incentive.
The six PIP Incentives that continue to remain unchanged are:
- eHealth Incentive
- After Hours Incentive
- Rural Loading Incentive
- Teaching Payment
- Indigenous Health Incentive, and
- Procedural General Practitioner Payment.