Thumbnail image for cash.jpgCould P4P4P be the future for effective HIV prevention? I’m very supportive of trying this if it works. From Dr. John G. Bartlett (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine), 10 Changes in HIV Care That Are Revolutionizing the Field, Medscape, Dec. 02, 2013:

  • P4P4P to Address the Gardner HIV Cascade Challenge

  • The Gardner cascade is well known to the HIV care community, but it represents a humbling pox on our HIV care system because it shows the very disappointing reality of HIV outcome. Despite the availability of powerful drugs for virtually all patients, only about 28% of the estimated 1.1 million Americans with HIV infection have achieved the goal of no detectable virus. The major issues accounting for this disappointing outcome are lapses in care at each step of the cascade -- testing, enrollment in care, retention in care, and adherence to ART. Many articles have been written about this cascade and have described possible methods to address each step, but none have clearly achieved a major advance.

  • The potential breakthrough in this stalemate is P4P4P, or “pay for performance for patients,” which provides financial or other reward for patients to get tested, engage care, stay in care, and achieve viral suppression. It is now being studied in a controlled trial in Washington, DC, and Bronx, New York.

  • The reason for optimism is that P4P4P seems to have worked well in virtually all areas of chronic care that are dependent on patient adherence, including hypertension, diabetes, smoking, obesity, and measurement of INR. This approach to medical management of chronic disease is controversial, so it is not included in HIV guidelines or polite discussions, even though it is low-cost and virtually always works. Instead, we spend long hours and great resources to achieve this goal by other methods.

  • It is anticipated that the well-controlled National Institutes of Health-sponsored trial of P4P4P will impart validity and acceptability to this rarely discussed topic.