Part B Insider (Multispecialty) Coding Alert

Published on Wed May 07, 2003 PDF

Physicians might already feel that they're being monitored more than enough, but the feds see things differently - and they're planning to focus their sights even more closely on doctors' offices.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has the wheels in motion to launch the "Doctors Office Quality" (DOQ) project, which aims, the agency says, to "define overall quality measures that assess and strategies that improve clinician performance in providing ambulatory care for persons with chronic disease."

DOQ is a three-year project that CMS hopes will help physicians "examine how well they are providing chronic care to Medicare beneficiaries" and will "develop a model for measurement and improvement of quality of care for chronic disease and preventive services at the level of the individual physician/medical office."

Under this project - slated to be tested in California, Iowa and New York beginning this summer - physicians can expect heightened scrutiny of their clinical quality, systems of care and patient experience of care, CMS says.

For more information, go to http://www.cms.gov/quality/doq/.