People generally select their doctor based on very little information — the recommendation of a friend, location or even office hours. For such an important decision, shouldn’t you have a more objective way of finding excellent physicians?
In partnership with two of the nation’s leading advocacy organizations, the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, NCQA has developed two recognition programs to help identify doctors who deliver excellent care to patients with diabetes amd cardiac-related illnesses. A third program, Physician Practice Connections® recognizes providers who have adopted practice systems — typically technology based systems such as electronic medical records — to help them deliver the best care consistently.
In 2007, NCQA took the same expertise towards back pain, identifying those who provide care for patients with back pain that medical evidence has shown to be most effective and efficient. Earlier this year, NCQA launched a new Physician Practice Connections program that recognizes physician practices functioning as a patient-centered medical home. The medical home is a promising approach that seeks to strengthen the patient-physician relationship by replacing episodic care with coordinated care and a long-term healing relationship.
Helping people identify high-quality doctors is important: some doctors are simply more effective than others in treating particular illnesses. And the health care you get from one physician for a given illness may be very different from the care you get from a different physician for the same illness. Our Recognition programs help people find those doctors that consistently treat patients according to the best available scientific evidence.
Providers who participate in Recognition programs tend to improve the quality of care they provide quite rapidly. Professional ethics is a strong motivator throughout the field, and doctors who identify opportunities for improvement typically change practice patterns and make improvements quickly. Among doctors who participate in the Diabetes Recognition Program, rates for nephropathy screening, lipid screening and control and blood pressure control (<140 mg) all improved between 50% and 100% within five years, a much faster rate of improvement than among health plans.
Employers and others have taken note of the value of physician-level recognition and performance measurement programs. Many large employers and coalitions such as the Bridges to Excellence coalition are experimenting with physician-level pay-for-performance programs to help encourage doctors to participate in such programs. And as employers know, when their employees get better care, they will be happier, more motivated and more productive.