MEDICARE NEWS

07/28/2010     

Many Physician Groups Doubt Value of PQRI

Proposed changes to the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, the CMS' effort to aggregate claims-based quality data and reward the physicians who submit them, are meeting with no small amount of skepticism among doctors. Many physician associations and advocacy groups are urging their members to steer clear of the error-prone, claims-based reporting mechanism altogether and to instead put their energy and resources into qualified registries or EHR-based reporting. Clinical registries collect data from their users and report performance directly to the government or other organizations.

One of the biggest issues up to this point, according to the CMS, has been the large number of physicians who participated in the voluntary program using claims-based reporting, but who failed to qualify for bonus payments. In both 2007 and 2008, only about half of the eligible professionals who submitted claims-based quality data actually qualified for payments, the CMS said in the proposed rule.

Source: Maureen McKinney, Modern Healthcare [7/26/10]