Providers running the national Health and Work Service (HWS) will not be incentivised to return people to work.
Instead they will be measured on the outputs they produce such as the quality of assessments undertaken and the return to work plans produced.
As first revealed in November, the HWS is expected to be launched in phases starting later this year and will seek to quickly return employees to work who have been or are expected to be absent for four weeks or more.
Speaking at the Health and Wellbeing 2014 conference, DWP chief medical adviser Dr Bill Gunnyeon explained that there were too many factors involved in whether an employee eventually returned to work to use this as a true measure of success.
"Getting someone back to work as an outcome is quite difficult because there are so many factors," he said.
"We did a lot of consideration and deliberation around this and its actually quite difficult to hold the provider responsible, certainly for something that is in effect a one-off assessment before getting them back to work.
"But certainly the important thing is the quality of the assessment and the return to work plan which is the thing that, if it's a robust plan and has been engaged with by the employer, should help facilitate the return to work."
