AMA leads project to develop quality measures by year's end

AMA leaders say the agreement with lawmakers averted a hasty shift to Medicare pay-for-performance. Some specialty societies are critical of the initiative.

By David Glendinning, AMNews staff. March 13, 2006.

--Washington The American Medical Association has assured Congress that physicians are ready to put the final pieces in place for a workable voluntary Medicare quality reporting system by the end of this year. But some medical specialty groups, saying that this road inevitably leads to pay-for-performance for doctors, worry that the AMA has promised more than physicians can deliver.

At the heart of the dispute is a joint House-Senate working agreement signed in December 2005 by AMA Board Chair Duane M. Cady, MD; Senate Finance Committee Chair Charles Grassley (R, Iowa); House Ways and Means Committee Chair Bill Thomas (R, Calif.); and House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee Chair Nathan Deal (R, Ga.).

The document states that physician groups will have developed roughly 140 quality-of-care measures by the end of 2006 and that each doctor can start voluntarily informing the government how well he or she does on at least three to five of them, starting in 2007. Physicians who do so should receive extra Medicare compensation next year to cover the costs of collecting the data, the plan states.

The Association said that this timetable is well within the physician community's grasp. The Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement already has developed 90 such measures and is well on the way to producing dozens more, said Nancy H. Nielsen, MD, PhD, speaker of the AMA House of Delegates. The AMA-convened consortium brings together representatives from more than 70 national specialty societies and state medical societies with government representatives in an effort to boost the quality of medical care.