If we are to improve health care, we need effective ways to measure how health care providers deliver care. Speakers at this conference will assess how existing physician performance measurement tools operate and how we can improve their accuracy, reliability, transparency, and usefulness. For example, both the Government Accountability Office and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission have recently examined how Medicare claims data might be used to measure relative resource use by individual physicians across particular “episodes of care.” Such clinically equivalent evaluation periods are generally based on the entire package of services required to treat a particular illness, regardless of treatment location or duration. Those efficiency measures could then be combined with measures of the quality of care to help develop overall profiles of their performance, along with incentives to improve it and reward better care. A number of health care purchasers, such as large insurers, employer groups, and state government bodies, are increasingly measuring physician performance through promising but limited mechanisms. 

Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt will give a keynote speech on the objectives and achievements of the Bush administration’s value-driven health care initiative, highlighting how chartered “value exchanges” could evaluate and report on health care value. 

Panelists will discuss the practical side of getting “from here to there” in physician performance measurement and value-driven health care, with particular attention to the difficult and complex tradeoffs ahead concerning such issues as what should be measured; how to do it; how to aggregate and pool data from multiple sources, including Medicare claims data; how to interpret and use the findings; and what level of transparency is needed to ensure that performance measures are fair, sustainable, and accurate.