The Fund continues to support efforts to gather and disseminate information on the quality of care. Building on its series of chartbooks, the Fund published the first installment in a new series of "
Performance Snapshots" on its Web site in December 2006. Performance Snapshots use graphs and narratives to demonstrate health
care system challenges, successes, and opportunities to improve. Users can search this online resource by area of interest or quality domain. They can also create and save their own collections of charts for later reference or for use in their own presentations. Regular additions will provide up-to-date information on important quality indicators and trends, as well as new data on emerging issues.
While there are ongoing efforts to assess the quality of care and costs in health plans and hospitals, there is little such information available for physician groups or practices. In February 2006, the Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP), a coalition of physicians,
hospitals, health plans, purchasers, consumers, government agencies, and academics, publicly released a report on the performance of 150 medical groups on 15 measures of clinical quality.
(10) Along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fund supported rigorous methodological work by Dana Safran, Sc.D., that laid the groundwork for the MHQP analysis—helping make the case for the feasibility, accuracy, and validity of public reporting of performance data.
(11)The MHQP data offer a unique opportunity to shed light on the factors that affect physician performance. With Fund support, Eric Schneider, M.D., and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health will survey physician leaders at each of the Massachusetts practices and visit selected practices to determine the organizational, cultural, and other characteristics associated with high performance. The results will inform policymakers and providers in other parts of the country.
In partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fund is supporting the 2006 National Survey of Physician Organizations, a project led by Stephen Shortell, Ph.D., at the University of California, Berkeley. The UC Berkeley team led a survey in 2000 to evaluate the extent to which large medical groups had implemented evidence-based care management processes for asthma, congestive heart failure, depression, and diabetes. Findings revealed that few medical groups used care management processes, and that external incentives and information technology capacity were associated with greater use. But much has changed since then: quality improvement methods are more common, more varied payment incentives have been adopted, and a national agenda for use of health information technology has been established. Shortell's team will re-survey large physician group practices to evaluate progress made in the management of chronic illness. These follow-up results will provide critical information on the effectiveness of ongoing incentive programs and will help guide future plans.
