The National Committee for Quality Assurance recently praised the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services for launching a new pay-for-quality pilot project designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in large medical groups. The 10 large medical groups participating in the program will have Medicare incentive payments linked to their performance on various NCQA- and American Medical Association-developed clinical measures. The Medicare program has seven major pay-for-quality efforts and 84 similar efforts have been started nationwide.

“NCQA is proud to support CMS in this effort,” says Margaret E. O’Kane, NCQA president. “Pay-for-quality is a beautifully simple and effective strategy for improving care. It works for the rest of the economy and it’s time we made health care work the same way.”

The NCQA reports that current payment policies contribute substantially to the health care system’s quality woes by often inadvertently rewarding poor quality. Pay-for-quality programs reward providers based on how well they score on different metrics ranging from clinical quality to member satisfaction.

For more information, visit www.ncqa.org.

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