GOVERNMENTMedPAC explores physician comparisonsThe American Medical Association warns of the perils of using raw Medicare claims data to assess doctor efficiency.By David Glendinning, amednews staff. May 16, 2005. Washington -- One of the first steps toward encouraging doctors to provide more efficient care to their Medicare patients could involve showing them that their colleagues are doing a better job, according to some Medicare policy-makers. Federal officials and the panel that advises lawmakers on Medicare are starting to explore this concept. By telling individual physicians how they rank among other doctors within the program when it comes to the number and level of services they provide to certain types of patients, the government can convince some of the overutilizers to rein in their habits, they said. "This is where it is in terms of getting at the cost issue," said Francis Crosson, MD, executive director of the Permanente Federation's medical groups and a member of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. MedPAC recommended to Congress in March that it direct Medicare officials to undertake such an initiative. The process would involve combing through claims submitted by doctors and establishing a confidential system for feeding the results back to the physicians. Sharing both individual and aggregate data would serve as a powerful educational tool for doctors, said Anne Mutti, a MedPAC consultant. "They can look to see, for example, if in treating emphysema patients they use three times as much hospital care but don't use as much prescription drugs or home health care as compared to their peers," she said. "They may decide that they would like to better align their care or they may decide not to. But at least they have that information." [...]Full text of American Medical News content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2005 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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