Practice Incentives Program payments

Once you’re in the Practice Incentives Program (PIP), you’ll get payments automatically into your bank account. You need to meet eligibility requirements for each entire quarter.

We make payments every quarter, in February, May, August and November. We’ll send payment statements to your practice by mail or online in Health Professional Online Services (HPOS).

Automatically calculated payments

We automatically calculate entitlements for payments based on information received from your practice. This means it’s important to let us know of any changes in your practice arrangements.

Some PIP payments are based on a measure of the practice size, known as the Standardised Whole Patient Equivalent (SWPE) value.

The SWPE value is a calculation of practice size. It’s based on Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) services all general practitioners and nurse practitioners provide in the practice.

The SWPE value includes Medicare and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) services provided to patients during the reference period. This is a rolling, historical, 12-month period. It starts 16 months before the payment quarter.

To work out the SWPE values, we calculate the fraction of care given to each patient. This is known as the Whole Patient Equivalent, which equals 1.0.

For example, in a 12-month period, a patient gets $100 in MBS benefits at Practice A and $400 at Practice B, a total of $500:

• Practice A is assigned $100 ÷ $500 or 0.2 of the patient’s care.
• Practice B is assigned $400 ÷ $500 or 0.8 of the patient’s care.

This is weighted for the age and gender of each patient. The weighting recognises people have different care needs at different stages of life.

The weighting amounts below are revised each quarter.

Request a review

You can ask us to review our decision on changes in:

• practice payments
• practice status including closed or withdrawn or other reviews for the PIP or Workforce Incentive Program - Practice Stream.

Use the Practice incentives review of decision form (IP027).