Public Report Cards

In response to consumer demand for information to aid in making provider decisions, health plans, purchaser coalitions and government health agencies are releasing cost and quality of care performance results on hospitals and physician practices. Public reporting can change provider behavior through reputational effects.

In California, the IHA P4P program has been reporting standardized physician group results for patients since 2005. In 2006, performance results from Kaiser Permanente physician groups were added to the public report. With aggregated data from 8 health plans, there is sufficient sample size to display public results for most of the 230 physician groups, which represent 35,000 individual physicians. Today, consumers benefit from being able to search comparable information across physician groups in different geographic regions.

The physician group public report card for Commercial HMO is published annualy on the Office of the Patient Advocate website. Results for the most current measurement year are available and previous measurement years can be accessed as well.

The physician group public report card for Medicare Advantage is also available. Measurement Year 2008 was the first year of reporting.