Medicare To Provide Beneficiaries With Information On Physician Performance

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that the Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care (Delmarva), one of its quality improvement organizations, has entered into subcontracts with four regional collaboratives, as part of the Better Quality Information to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries (BQI) Project.

These regional collabortives will combine Medicare data with data from other insurers to produce information on the performance of health care providers for the benefit of Medicare beneficiaries. The following regional collaboratives have signed subcontracts:  Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP), Minnesota Community Measurement (MNCM), and Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ).

The results of the BQI Project will be used for two primary purposes: first, to provide performance information to physicians that will assist them in improving the quality of care they are delivering to Medicare beneficiaries; and second, to give physician performance information to Medicare beneficiaries in order to help them with physician selection.

“This is an important advancement,” said CMS Acting Administrator Leslie V. Norwalk, Esq. “The BQI project will give Medicare beneficiaries a broad overview of provider performance resulting in better choices in meeting their health care needs.  The regional collaboratives, spurred by great leadership from physicians and others in the health care community, will also provide critical information to physicians and Medicare on the best practices for data collection, aggregation, and reporting.”

The BQI Project is part of HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt’s Value-driven Health Care Initiative which is based on the following four cornerstones announced in President Bush’s Executive Order issued August, 2006:  interoperable health information technology (health IT);transparency of price information; transparency of quality information; and the use of incentives to promote high-quality and cost-efficient health care.  The Executive Order directs federal agencies, to the extent permitted by law, to share information with beneficiaries on the quality of services provided by doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers.

The objective of the Initiative is to provide the public and providers with reliable and consistent measures of quality care.  The subcontracts announced today will allow the BQI project to apply these principles to the Medicare program.