[MMA News Now, January, 26, 2012] The 2012 legislative session wasn’t more than 12 hours old when the MMA offered testimony before the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee about refining the Provider Peer Grouping law.

The Provider Peer Grouping program is a Minnesota Department of Health Initiative established through Minnesota’s 2008 Heath Care Reform Act to compare the cost and quality of care provided by clinics and hospitals. Although many provider groups, along with the MMA, have been supportive of the intent of Provider Peer Grouping, major concerns have been raised about the accuracy and value of the preliminary data released.

The Department of Health released preliminary hospital data in September 2011. But because of data shortcomings, the department recently recalled it and delayed further implementation of the program until those concerns could be addressed.

During public testimony, on Tuesday, Dave Renner, MMA’s the director of state and federal legislation, acknowledged the complexity of the project and commended the Department of Health on its recent decision to delay public reporting. He addressed the committee with the MMA’s concerns and presented several ideas for strengthening the program.

“The MMA has been actively engaged in the peer grouping program since its passage in 2008 and we are committed to offering physician input into the project,” Renner said. “We believe that this project offers enormous potential, if done right, to improve care and expand information available to Minnesotans.”

But given the hospitals’ recent experience, the MMA is very concerned about the potential accuracy of clinic results. “The law needs to take steps to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of data that are used to determine cost and quality performance of clinics,” Renner said. “Published data that is three or four years old has no value.”

He said that it will be extremely difficult for clinics to verify the accuracy of the data used to calculate their performance because of the complexity of the project, the limitations in the current law that de-identifies all raw data, and the methods used to analyze the data.

Among ideas the MMA will likely advance are:

• Changing the law to focus the results on quality improvement and not just on health plan product development;
• Changing the law to ‘permit’ but not require health plans to use the data for product design; and
• Separating the peer grouping project from the all-payer database (which was created through the program) and maintaining the all-payer database for quality improvement purposes, even if the peer grouping program should end.

“We are looking forward to working with the Department of Health to move the program forward, said Renner. “The MMA supported passage of peer grouping because we felt it offered a tremendous opportunity to move quality and cost measurement forward in a public, transparent and standardized way.”