Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Plus:  Feds invest in building NHIN Infrastructure.

After enduring serious scrutiny from federal watchdog agencies and the Senate Finance Committee, Medicare's Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) are finally showing their worth.

The 53 QIO contracts that span the entire United States eat up approximately $300 million of government money annually. Now the once allegedly ineffective QIOs are beginning to prove that they can improve care quality.

Providers working with QIOs showed greater improvement in their performance on 18 of 20 nursing-home, home-health and physician-office quality measures than provider that didn't work with QIOs, according to a new study that appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Home health agencies and nursing homes working with QIOs saw the most improvement in all quality measures, the study reveals.

"Nineteen of 21 hospital measures showed improvement; in this setting, QIOs were contracted for improvement initiatives solely at the statewide level," the study says. And overall, researchers recorded improvement in 34 of 41 measures. ONC Lays Down The Bucks To Get NHIN Moving Critics who have questioned the federal government's financial commitment to national health information network (NHIN) goals will be happy to hear that it has ponied up some cash to build the network backbone.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced it has hired BearingPoint Inc. to provide program management support services and communications infrastructure between government and industry.

The initial contract is for $3.4 million for the first year and could be worth up to $13.7 million over four years, according to The Washington Post.

The ONC is now focusing on establishing health information network standards so you can be sure that your health information technology systems will be compatible with each other and the national system no matter who you purchase them from.

The ONC is tasking BearingPoint to set up the structure to communicate these standards to health plans and test how they work with prototypes and pilot projects. Look for a communications portal in the near future that will keep you abreast of standards development and other NHIN initiatives.