More than 60 organizations have signed on with an American Medical Association (AMA) initiative aimed at helping physicians put payer-provided data reports to better use to enhance the quality of care, the AMA announced Monday.
"Almost every public and private health insurer presents physicians with practice profile reports to support data-driven decision-making," said AMA President Jeremy A. Lazarus, MD. "This feedback has been ineffective since the complex reports vary from plan to plan and are difficult to read and interpret."
To help create data reports that physicians can easily understand and use, the AMA created the "Guidelines for Reporting Physician Data" with input from public and private health insurers, state and specialty medical societies, health standard organizations, and employer and consumer coalitions, officials say. The new guidelines are meant to provide a roadmap for improving the usefulness of physician data reports by encouraging greater format standardization, process transparency and level of detail.
"The organizations who have pledged to use the AMA guidelines recognize that providing physicians with ineffective or inaccurate practice data represents a missed opportunity," said Lazarus. "Encouraging industry-wide standardization of practice data reports will help physicians double-check the information and use accurate data as a tool to identify opportunities for practice improvement."