Physician profiling: can Medicare paint an accurate picture?

Physician profiling, that is, the comparison of the health care services used by a physician's patients to average service use or another benchmark, has been proposed as a way to improve Medicare. It has been used by private health plans and physician groups to identify both efficient practice patterns and the physicians who practice efficiently. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have recommended that Medicare adopt physician profiling to slow spending growth and improve efficiency. Recent legislation would mandate that Medicare employ profiling. This issue brief reviews MedPAC and GAO's analyses of profiling, concerns about using this type of information, and the obstacles in incorporating profiling in the Medicare program.

Snapshot of hospital quality reporting and pay-for-performance under Medicare

This paper examines the impact that Medicare pay-for-performance (P4P) might have upon hospital payment. It uses the initial two quarters of a national quality database to model financial gains or losses using the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration rules, as well as the P4P approach recommended by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Findings reveal variation among all types of hospitals and across all measures within each of the three conditions studied: heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia. Initially, hospitals' financial gains and losses likely will be marginal using the Premier demonstration payment rules and somewhat larger under the MedPAC recommendations as modeled.

Fighting for their share. As Congress ponders how to fix the sustainable growth-rate formula for physicians, hospitals are wary they'll be a target

As Congress tries to figure out how to fix Medicare's physician payment system, other sectors of the industry are poised to protect their share of reimbursement. Hospitals in particular are worried that they'll be targeted to fix the problem with doctors' reimbursement, which Bill Petasnick, left, blames for driving the growth of specialty hospitals, imaging centers and ambulatory surgical centers.

Caveat emptor: joint ventures with specialty hospitals

A specialty hospital joint venture between a health system and physician investors may implicate anti-kickback and tax laws when physicians self-refer patients to the hospital, raising the issue of conflict of interest. Physician self-referral can motivate behavior, such as cherry-picking patients and increased utilization, which in turn leads to windfall profits for physician owners and weakens classic community hospitals. Hopitals can best serve the interests of patients and improve performance by building enduring partnerships with physicians.