Building empirical evidence for scoring and classifying physician performance

This project will establish empirical evidence for methods to reliably score physicians on the quality of the care they provide. This project is one of twelve the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is supporting to respond to heightened concern across the country about the ballooning costs and poor quality of health care. In April 2010, the Foundation issued a broad call for ideas from the field to rein in spending without jeopardizing patient care. It received 277 proposals and, based on input from independent reviewers, selected the most novel ideas and those most likely to engender far-reaching change. These grants, totaling $3.1 million, address issues in value-based purchasing, quality improvement support, public reporting of provider performance, and data collection and aggregation for performance measurement. This project will: (1) make hierarchal scoring and performance classification understandable by testing and documenting the properties of the scoring methodology and developing written explanations of the information on physicians; (2) address the real-world dilemma of classifying physician performance with methods that incorporate results for physicians with and without corrected scores; and (3) test a novel method of stratified sampling to ease the burden on physicians of having to make corrections. Deliverables will include a report to reach audiences that are grappling with transparency in physician and medical-group quality performance and a manuscript for a peer-review journal to contribute to the evidence used by organizations that set health care performance standards, health services researchers and others.

Grant Details

Amount Awarded $200,009.00

Awarded on: 10/25/2010

Time frame: 11/1/2010 - 1/31/2012

Grant Number: 68275