Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Plus: Now's your chance to comment on proposed standards. A new project to report on your quality will help you improve your outcomes. But it'll also provide information on your practice's performance to beneficiaries, to help them choose a better doctor, warns the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

CMS says the Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care, a quality improvement organization, has contracted with four regional collaboratives as part of the Better Quality Information to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries (BQI) Project. The regional organizations will combine Medicare data with data from other insurers to produce report cards on your performance to provide to patients. New Quality Measures Adapt To EMRs, Include Cost Of Care The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) released an expanded set of measures, guidelines and technical specifications based on NCQA's HEDIS tool to assess physician practice quality.

The evaluation points include 25 measures of clinical quality at the physician level and 50 indicators. The specifications also set standards for the measurement of the cost of care and guidelines for collecting data on quality. And NCQA also provides standardized data collection methods that account for electronic medical records (EMRs) and episode-grouping software. You can comment on the proposed measures by going to www.ncqa.org/.