The Better Quality Information to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries Project: Exploring Approaches to Physician Performance Measurement

On August 22, 2006, President Bush issued an Executive Order calling on all federal agencies and those who do healthcare business with the government to engage in collaborative efforts to incorporate the 4 cornerstones of value-driven healthcare: health information technology standards, quality standards, price standards, and incentives. The Department of Health and Human Services has embarked on a campaign to make these 4 cornerstones a reality by encouraging the public and private sectors to work collaboratively at the local level. In support of this campaign, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched a project in late 2006 that leverages local collaboratives as a means to explore a national approach to physician performance measurement. This project, which is known as the Better Quality Information to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries Project, aims to test methods to aggregate Medicare administrative data with data from commercial health plans and, in some cases, Medicaid, in 6 local collaboratives to calculate and report quality measures for physician groups and for some individual physicians.