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News
Release
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 4, 2003
| FOR MORE INFORMATION: | IHA: (925)746-5100 or bcarter@iha.org | |
| Brian Schilling, NCQA: (202)955-5104 | ||
| Horace Clark, DDD: (310) 973-2880 |
IHA AWARDS NCQA CONTRACT TO ANALYZE PHYSICIAN GROUP
DATA FOR “PAY FOR PERFORMANCE” PROGRAM
Information
will be basis for California physician group incentives,
scorecards;
Diversified Data Design Corp. to
help collect and standardize data
WALNUT
CREEK, Calif., and WASHINGTON—The Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA), a
California health care policy leadership group, and the National Committee for
Quality Assurance (NCQA), a national leader in collecting, analyzing and
reporting health care quality information, today announced that IHA has awarded
NCQA a contract to serve as the independent data aggregator for the IHA-led Pay
for Performance (P4P) program.
P4P is the nation’s largest performance-based
rewards initiative, involving six major California health plans and almost 300
physician groups serving 7 million commercial HMO enrollees.
A subcontractor, Culver City,
Calif.-based Diversified Data Design Corp. (DDD), will collect health care data
generated from participating health plans and physician groups.
NCQA will then analyze the data and produce reports that will be used as
the basis for a public scorecard and individual health plan physician group
incentive programs, as well as feedback to the participating physician groups
and plans.
“We are delighted to have such an experienced and well-respected team in this critical role,” said Beau Carter, IHA Executive Director. “The NCQA-DDD partnership is a perfect blend of national and California experience and technical skill that will serve us well in an initiative that depends upon valid, comparable data and relationships built on mutual trust and respect.”
“Consumers don’t want 10 different report cards on physician group quality, they want one good one,” said NCQA President Margaret E. O’Kane. “That’s what this effort will give them—a standardized report that they can use to make more informed health care choices. This is a model for the rest of the nation.”
P4P is designed to create a “business case for quality” at the physician group level. Under the program, physician groups will be compared based on a common set of performance measures addressing three key domains: clinical quality, patient experience, and investment in information technology (IT). NCQA adapted existing Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDISâ) measures for the clinical quality domain. These measures track the quality of care for preventive health procedures, such as cancer screening, and chronic conditions, such as asthma and diabetes. P4P’s patient experience measures are based on the Pacific Business Group on Health’s (PBGH) Consumer Assessment Survey; 128 California physician groups participated in the Survey in 2003, and that figure is expected to increase significantly in 2004.
Diversified
Data Design Corp., a health care data processing firm, will collect and
standardize clinical quality data for analysis. DDD enters the program with longstanding relationships with
five of the six P4P health plans and 95 percent of the state’s delegated
physician groups.
“This is a unique and uniquely-qualified partnership,” added Horace Clark, President and CEO of DDD. “We have a long history of improving the quality of data submission from California physician groups to health plans, which is a perfect complement to NCQA’s experience with P4P and technical data skills.”
NCQA
will analyze the data and prepare the aggregated results for IHA.
In partnership with the State of California Office of the Patient
Advocate (OPA), IHA will use the aggregated data to produce a public scorecard
comparing physician group performance, and the six participating health plans
will use the comparative performance data as the basis for their individual
financial bonus programs. The scorecard will be widely disseminated in printed
form and on the OPA Web site in September 2004.
NCQA
has considerable experience in performance
measurement and data collection and reporting.
Since 1993, it has managed the development of HEDIS, a measurement tool
that has served as the foundation of NCQA’s annual State
of Health Care Quality report and health plan “report cards” in New York
and other states. In addition, NCQA
has developed physician and group-level clinical performance measures and
measures of IT capability for pay-for-performance initiatives in several parts
of the country.
NCQA
has worked closely with California’s physician groups and plans since the 2001
launch of the Provider Group Oversight Improvement Project (P-GO), a
California HealthCare Foundation-funded collaborative with PBGH.
NCQA, through P-GO, has provided technical assistance to the P4P program
since the beginning of 2002.
The IHA data aggregator contract runs from October 2003 through September 2004. Most of the active data aggregation work will take place in the spring of 2004, when the team will receive clinical, patient experience and information technology investment data from the participating physician groups and plans.
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IHA
(www.iha.org)
is a California leadership group of health plans, physician groups, and health
care systems, plus academic, purchaser, consumer, and pharmaceutical industry
representatives, committed to policy development, public dialogue, and
special projects associated with the continuing evolution of managed health
care.
NCQA (www.ncqa.org)
is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care
quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations,
recognizes physicians and physician groups in key clinical areas and manages the
evolution of HEDISâ,
the tool the nation’s health plans use to measure and report on their
performance. NCQA is committed to providing health care quality information
through the Web, media and data licensing agreements in order to help consumers,
employers and others make more informed health care choices.
For More Information:
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