Dr. Bruce Siegel, president of the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems and a former head of the hospitals corporation, called the plan “unprecedented for American public hospitals, in terms of scale, in terms of moving us into a new model.”

Los Angeles County, which has the nation’s second-largest public health system after New York, does not have anything similar, said Dr. Anish Mahajan, director of system planning for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. “What an intriguing idea,” Dr. Mahajan said. “That’s something we would hold out as a potential thing we do in the future.”

Administrators at several private New York hospitals said they were considering incorporating the federal benchmarks into their salary structures, but have not yet done so on a significant scale.

The public hospital system has come up with 13 performance indicators. Among them are how well patients say their doctors communicate with them, how many patients with heart failure and pneumonia are readmitted within 30 days, how quickly emergency room patients go from triage to beds, whether doctors get to the operating room on time and how quickly patients are discharged.

Union officials said they were still fighting for wage increases, in addition to performance bonuses. The union has also proposed expanding the indicators to 20, including measures that would give doctors bonuses for going to community meetings, giving lectures, getting training during work hours, screening patients for obesity and counseling them to stop smoking. It has also proposed excluding some patients — like developmentally disabled patients, homeless people and those who have no place to go — from incentives aimed at reducing the time patients spend in the hospital.

A union official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to upset negotiations, said doctors considered the proposal demeaning. “To say we’ll stick a carrot in front of you and therefore you’re going to be a better doctor is a little disingenuous,” he said.

In a written statement, Dr. Barry Liebowitz, the president of the union, the Doctors Council S.E.I.U., said it supported performance incentives in theory, if they “will improve patient care.” But he called for a team approach and hinted that the union would demand more doctors and support staff.