The Pacific Business Group on Health and Lumetra, California's Quality Improvement Organization, co-sponsored a conference on October 5–6, 2004, in Washington to map a research and policy agenda to advance physician performance measures.

Key Conclusions

• There are already tools in the marketplace that can produce physician performance scores for quality and cost-efficiency using administrative data such as data derived from hospital discharge summaries, physician billing claims and claims for prescription drugs.
• There is significant effort underway to develop consensus on national standards for physician quality and cost-efficiency performance measurements that could drive system change.

Key Recommendations

To move the physician measurement agenda forward, conference participants recommended:

• Continued development of evidence-based quality measures that can assess individual physician performance on a broad and deep array of medical conditions and medical specialties.
• Further work to standardize the quality and cost-efficiency measures that the marketplace will use to assess physician performance.
• Research to assess the best ways to construct stable performance scores (e.g., levels of aggregation) and which discriminate performance.
• Research to assess the optimal ways to provide feedback to physicians and consumers/patients to facilitate their understanding and use of the information.

Funding

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) provided $25,000 to support publication of a summary report of the conference. The publication is available online.