IT used to measure quality of physician's performance

13.02.2006
As more health care organizations move to pay physicians based on meeting certain quality standards, IT is playing a bigger role in aggregating the data used to measure care.

Some organizations are using the financial incentives from these "pay for performance" programs to justify the investment in costly IT upgrades, according to speakers Sunday at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference.

David Brailer, the national coordinator for health information technology, described pay-for-performance programs and IT as "first cousins," that increasingly are intersecting as health care providers grapple with ways to fund electronic health records (EHR). Some studies have shown that physician practices that heavily invest in IT have 30 percent better patient outcomes than those without the technology, he said.

Some physicians struggling to justify the expense of EHRs are looking at pay-for-performance programs as a way to offset some of the hefty costs, which can be tens of thousands of dollars annually per physician. In California, for example, a pay-for-performance program operated by the Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) last year paid out US$90 million to physicians who met quality standards. The IHA, which is a nonprofit collaborative of physicians, health care systems and health plans, has inspired significant efforts among the 225 participating physician groups to collect relevant data, said Ronald Bangasser, director of external affairs at Beaver Medical Group in Redlands, Calif., which participates in the IHA's incentives program.

"We're starting to see the improvements, and that's what got the physicians to buy into the idea," Bangasser said. "Now people are talking about quality. If the physician thinks it's a good measurement, and you put money behind it, you'll get change more quickly."

Beaver Medical last year received $1.2 million in payments from the IHA, half of which went to participating doctors, while the other half was invested in IT, he said. However, the group didn't qualify for an additional $400,000 because of a drop in patient satisfaction. The group quickly hired a consultant to help raise those scores, he added.