PHILADELPHIA – Medical groups participating in Medicare’s quality reporting program are finding that it weighs them down with extra costs and consumes their time, and some say the potential for additional reimbursement may not offset higher costs.
Research indicates that medical groups using the Medicare program are hiring new staff and raising current staff salaries to meet the need for data. About 35 percent of respondents to a recent survey say they had to create an addendum to their superbill paperwork to capture quality information.
The research, done by the Medical Group Management Association in September and October, came three months into Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, a replacement for the 2006 Physician Voluntary Reporting Program.
The comprehensibility of the program is a problem some highlighted, and less than half of those surveyed found the program to be “beneficial and worthwhile” to their practice. Only half of those surveyed rated the program as satisfactory, according to MGMA.
Of the 190 groups that responded, only 13 percent reported that the PQRI is helpful to patients, and only 16 percent say it improves the care outcomes.
“We use an electronic medial record system, so capturing the data has not been all that difficult. However, it takes approximately two to three hours a day,” said Allen Goree, an MGMA member who participated in the survey.
“We have not launched training sessions for our physicians to input the data due to the uncertainty of PQRI funding in 2008,” said Goree, CEO of the Missouri Heart Center in Columbia. “If there is no funding, I doubt we will continue.”