NEJM realized the PQRS Emperor has no clothes.
Perhaps the only health policy issue on which Republicans and Democrats agree is the need to move from volume-based to value-based payment for health care providers. Rather than paying for activity, the aspirational goal is to pay for outcomes that take into account quality and costs. In keeping with this notion of paying for value rather than volume, the Affordable Care Act ACA created the “value-based payment modifier,” or “value modifier,” a pay-for-performance approach for physicians who actively participate in Medicare. By 2017, physicians will be rewarded or penalized on the basis of the relative calculated value of the care they provide to Medicare beneficiaries.
Although we agree that value-based payment is appropriate as a concept, the practical reality is that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services CMS, despite heroic efforts, cannot accurately measure any physician’s overall value, now or in the foreseeable future. Instead of helping to establish a central role for performance measurement in holding providers more accountable for the care they provide and in informing quality- and safety-improvement projects, this policy overreach could undermine the quest for higher-value health care. Yet the medical profession has been remarkably quiet as this flawed approach proceeds.
via Grading a Physician’s Value — The Misapplication of Performance Measurement — NEJM.
How many tens of thousands of hours are spent jumping through hoops like these that turn out to be more meaningless (or worse) ‘government work’?
It is an interesting concept. I wonder if the government really will be able to constrain costs. I’ve seen little to no evidence of this in other government programs. However, cost transparency and competition has brought prices down for things like breast implants and Lasik. Things that are not paid for by the government.