Figuring out the best way to measure physician performance is a critical consideration for policymakers focusing on the transition to value-based care.
For example, MACRA requires physicians who participate in the MIPS quality incentive track to report on a clinically relevant subset drawing from 271 quality measures.
This makes for a careful consideration of measures to report. As Harvard Professor Michael Porter asserts, quality and performance improvements are key drivers of cost containment and higher value, where quality equates to better health outcomes.
It makes any strategic planning or decision making challenging, but there are some decisions that can set providers up for success in any case. Chief among these is investing in effective data tools.
The two most strategic measures to improve processes are either cause and relationship based or based on the balanced scorecard. The former continues to grow in popularity with organizations and takes recent developments into account through strategy mapping. A good balanced scorecard contains lagging measures (outcomes) and leading measures (performance drivers) that will predict outcomes.
Population level waste accounts for 45 percent of the total waste in care delivery and results in medical treatments for a given patient population that are unnecessary. The Deming Chain Reaction is a useful strategy, which emphasizes how lower costs can be gained by eliminating waste and errors, allowing for prices to be lowered increasing revolving income. Other useful measures that can be applied to the different settings of care and care processes can be found in AHRQ’s National Quality Measures and the National Quality Forum.
