The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have announced plans for reporting physician performance to Medicare beneficiaries.
CMS plans to make the public reports by combining Medicare data with data from private insurers. The reports will be part of the CMS Better Quality Information to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries (BQI) Project, designed to provide the public and providers with “reliable and consistent measures of quality care,” CMS said.
According to CMS, the Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care will manage the work through subcontracts with the Indiana Health Information Exchange, Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, Minnesota Community Measurement and Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality.
CMS said it plans to announce two additional subcontractors in the near future.
David Kibbe, MD, senior advisor at the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Center for HIT, said there will be a number of barriers to overcome before transparency can be achieved.
“Much of the challenge will be to connect many, many thousands of medical practices with the [CMS collaboratives, or data aggregators], as most physicians still don’t have EMRs, most EMRs can send the data out and most data aggregators have no way of electronically accepting the data,” he said.
“I hope the people that doctors trust can become competent enough to meet those challenges, and the people who are competent are willing to gain the physicians’ trust,” Kibbe said.
According to Leslie Norwalk, CMS’ acting administrator, the BQI project has been spurred by great leadership from physicians and others in the healthcare community.
“The local entities selected to participate in the BQI Project each bring a unique set of characteristics and experience that will prove beneficial in the implementation and ultimate success of the project,” she said. “Critical to our success in improving health care quality is having a process where stakeholders can come together on strategy and in working together to improve information on physician performance.”
The BQI project is part of President Bush’s August 2006 plan to build a value-driven, transparent healthcare system. The quality measures to be used in the BQI project are national consensus-based measures that have been adopted by AQA, an alliance of healthcare providers, health plans, senior groups, employers and unions that also played a role in the establishment of the subcontracting collaboratives, CMS said.