How to Get Physicians On Board with Performance Measurement

by | Aug 23, 2016 | Healthcare

Reading Time: 4 minutes

performance measurementSpiraling healthcare costs and an expanding emphasis on outcomes are shining a spotlight on the physician, who directly influences almost two-thirds of costs incurred in a patient’s hospital care. Aligning physician behavior with a hospital’s performance goals is crucial to both improve care quality and control costs.

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Critical to the success of any physician performance measurement solution is the need to get physician buy-in. Without the support of physicians, you likely won’t be able to achieve your desired results. In this article, we’ll examine how to build physician support for performance measurement.

Drivers for performance measurement

There are several things that are driving the need for physician performance measurement including:

  • Regulatory requirements: The Joint Commission’s Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) requires hospitals to measure physician performance for granting practice privileges.
  • Financial incentives: Under the federal EHR Incentive Program (Meaningful Use), hospitals receive financial incentives for using an EHR to capture patient health information and to track and analyze the data produced. CMS also incents doctors to report quality information via the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS).
  • Improvement: All hospitals are striving toward the “Triple Aim” – improving population health, improving the experience of care, and reducing per capita cost. Physician performance measurement can be a valuable tool to help reach these goals.

While the need for physician performance measurement has become more widespread, actual implementation has lagged. There are administrative and technical hurdles to overcome. This includes bringing together multiple sources of data and making the connections between all the data (and we have a solution for that).

Trusting the Data

But the biggest challenge lies not in the technical realm, but in establishing information credibility. If doctors don’t trust the data, they won’t buy-into the monitoring and measurement of their performance. That reduces the potential for successful alignment and meaningful improvements.

Common data complaints from physicians include:

  • “The data is wrong!”
  • “Where are you getting this information?”
  • “Who can see this data?”
  • “How do you know the patient meant me?”
  • “I never saw that patient, my partner did.”

Leveraging Technology

Fortunately, technology can go a long way in allaying these concerns. The right technology will not only automate the creation of physician performance profiles, but will also provide timely, self-service access for the physician to his/her performance information in an intuitive way — typically via interactive dashboards.

Data transparency is also fundamental for success. The physician should be able to monitor his/her performance at both summary and detailed levels for utilization, outcomes and patient satisfaction metrics. Being able to dig down into the data to see how the information relates to his/her individual patient interactions at a detailed level goes a long way toward building trust in the data.

With the right physician performance measurement solution, physicians are able to compare themselves to both overall benchmarks as well as to peers within the organization, specialty or practice group. This plays into and fuels their competitive natures and orientation towards achieving excellence.

Hospitals, in turn, can aggregate individual physician performance data to understand how physician practice patterns affect overall hospital performance and pinpoint the physicians who are in the best position to contribute to those improvements.

Aligning the Physician and Hospital

Objective, timely and credible data is the answer. It is the common ground upon which to engage the physician in those conversations about evidence-based practice and cost management that are essential for driving improvements in healthcare delivery.

To learn more about physician performance measurement, download the executive brief, 8 Things You Need to Know When Evaluating a Physician Scorecard Solution.”

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a previous article on the Dimensional Insight blog.

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