MINNEAPOLIS, March 18, 2010 - An MMA-endorsed bill to improve the state’s provider peer-grouping initiative ran into trouble in the Senate when Minnesota Commissioner of Health Sanne Magnan, M.D., testified Tuesday against giving doctors more time to analyze their cost and quality scores before they’re released to the public.

Doug Wood, M.D., testified before the House Health Care and Human Services Policy and Oversight Committee March 10 on behalf of the MMA and urged lawmakers to change the state’s provider peer grouping plan by adding a quality-improvement component that would help physicians and clinics improve their performance, extending by eight months the public release of the cost and quality data, and repealing a law that precludes providers who score in the bottom 10 percent on the quality and cost measures from participating in state-subsidized health insurance programs.

The House committee voted unanimously in favor of the bill (H.F. 3056/S.F. 2815).

However, the Senate Health, Housing, and Family Security Committee tabled the bill after Commissioner Magnan voiced her opposition to changing the current timelines. She said hospitals’ and clinics’ scores should be made public after no more than a 60-day review period by providers. Under the timeline stated in current law, hospitals and clinics were expected to get their first look at their cost and quality scores in June 2010; the state was then scheduled to publicly report those scores in September.

The state’s contract with its vendor, Mathematica Policy Research, however, will not allow them to meet the timelines in current law. Instead, results are expected to be made available in October 2010, and the Commissioner expressed her intent to publicly report the results no later than January 1, 2011. The MMA’s bill would extend the public release of the data until September 2011 to allow clinics and hospitals the time necessary to review and digest the data, and to realtiy-test the state’s methodological approach.

Peer grouping is designed to strengthen incentives for consumers to choose high-quality, low-cost health care providers by allowing them to compare the cost and quality of the care provided by hospitals and clinics. Clinics and hospitals will be ranked on performance measures related to total care for six conditions or procedures: diabetes, coronary artery disease, pneumonia, asthma, congestive heart failure, and total knee replacement.

The data will be drawn primarily from insurance claims, which the Minnesota Department of Health is collecting from all Minnesota payers—both public and private. Physicians will also report some quality data.

The peer-grouping initiative does not include an explicit emphasis to use data to improve the quality of the care, a use that the MMA strongly supports. Wood indicated that this is a serious oversight, since research has repeatedly shown that quality improvement programs that give providers such data and the resources to make changes lead to improved results, whereas there is far less data proving that publicly reported quality scores either improve outcomes or are frequently used by consumers.

“The MMA is not looking to limit public reporting,” Wood testified. “But quality improvement is where the real benefits can be gained.”