Health Care Quality Reporting: Changes and Challenges

The articles that comprise this special edition of the Health Care Financing Review cover a wide range of topics pertaining to the public reporting of health care quality. For many years, CMS and other purchasers have used public reporting of health care quality measures not only for public accountability of plans and providers for the care they provide, but also to assist consumers, health plans, and purchasers in making informed decisions to select higher quality care. While many purchasers are moving toward implementing pay-for-performance or value-based purchasing strategies, which will undoubtedly have their own impact on the health care marketplace, there is also a growing interest in the purchaser community in consumer-directed health care and other strategies to make employees and other consumers more aware of costs and more invested in careful selection of health care options, using as much cost and quality data as can be made available. Within the Federal Government these are reflected in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Transparency Initiative and in provisions of the 2006 Tax Relief and Health Care Act. The emerging strategies previously described argue for the need to improve public reporting on measures of quality. Not only will consumers need assistance making sense of an ever increasing array of types of quality data, but purchasers will need to assess that their measurement strategies are fair and equitable, not needlessly burdensome on providers and health plans, and that their measures can be acted on by plans and providers to improve quality, without unintended consequences. The articles included in this special edition of the Review point to the type of research needed in the field to address these urgent concerns.