Database to aid quality efforts

A California organization is implementing the project to help medical groups crunch more timely data for bonus and other programs.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Dec. 13, 2004.

The California Assn. of Physician Groups is planning to build a clinical data repository in an effort to offer its members a tool to benchmark quality, lower costs and ensure that they collect quality bonuses from insurers.

CAPG, which represents 149 large physician groups and independent physician associations, plans to launch the database as early as January 2005. Eleven physician groups and IPAs have committed to provide patient data in 2005 to the project, which will be expanded to other entities in 2006, said Donald Crane, CAPG's president and CEO.

Health, laboratory, pharmacy claims data and laboratory values are among the data that will be collected and analyzed. Individual groups will be able to access identifiable data of their patients, but not other groups' patients except for anonymous benchmark data, Crane said.

A major reason CAPG is undertaking the initiative is to better serve the needs of its members. Several of them already use information technology to collect and analyze their clinical data but can't benchmark themselves against peers because they lack access to data from other physician groups, said Douglas Allen, MD, chair of the CAPG committee developing the data repository. The project also will benefit groups that don't have data repositories, he said.