Healthcare Financial News

More than 30 communities have applied to participate in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ new electronic health record (EHR) demonstration project, which will offer primary care physician practices Medicare incentive payments to use certified EHRs to improve the quality of patient care. HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt remarked that this level of interest in the project “shows the great appetite for programs that offer incentives to physicians who efficiently use EHRs to improve the quality of care they provide to their patients.” HHS anticipates that the five-year project will improve the quality of care for about 3.6 million Americans.

HHS will announce the 12 communities selected for the EHR demonstration in early June. In the fall of 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will beginning working with four of these communities to recruit the project’s participating small- and medium-sized primary care physician practices. CMS will begin recruitment activities with the remaining eight communities in 2009.

Find more information at the CMS and HHS web sites about the EHR demonstration project and about the broader HHS initiative, Connecting to Better Health Care, of which the EHR demonstration project is a part.

Pay-for-performance initiatives that use an efficiency index (EI) to measure physician performance often hinder efforts to reduce overuse of services, a new study suggests. By focusing directly on ways to reduce overuse--without the limitations of EI methodology--physicians could have a more significant impact on improving cost efficiency, according to the study.

The study, “Beyond the Efficiency Index: Finding a Better Way to Reduce Overuse and Increase Efficiency in Physician Care,” was published as a Health Affairs web exclusive (Greene, R.A., et al., May 20, 2008). Researchers for the study suggest an alternative approach to measuring physician performance: determining which interventions are the main drivers of cost for specific conditions, then assessing whether physicians who use these interventions most frequently are obtaining better outcomes or simply generating higher costs. The model was applied to treatment of hypertension as well as fiberoptic laryngoscopy (a procedure that evaluates problems with swallowing). Read the study.