(NCQA: Washington) -- The National Committee for Quality Assurance recently released standards that updated its voluntary Physician and Hospital Quality (PHQ) program, an assessment of how health plans measure and report on the quality and cost of physicians and hospitals. NCQA launched PHQ in 2006 as a voluntary program to impartially evaluate the measures and methods of physician-measurement programs, the first independent effort to do so. Since then, 64 NCQA-accredited health plans have met the PHQ standards. The revisions issued today reflect changes in the market and demand from employers, consumers, regulators, and physicians around the country.

“Patients should expect to have information about quality when choosing physicians and hospitals,” says Margaret E. O’Kane, NCQA president. “But any effort to compare physicians and hospitals is only as good as its methods and its data. The physician and Hospital Quality program sets meaningful standards for organizations that develop information about the quality of physicians and hospitals in terms of relevance, validity, transparency and fairness. The updates to this program raise the bar.”

In recent years, initiatives to measure physician and hospital performance have proliferated. Health plans, purchasers, consumers, and regulators have all sought to sift through data in an effort to identify excelling providers for the purposes of informing patient choice.

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