September 15, 2005

New NCQA Reports Help People
with Chronic Illnesses Select Health Plan

Living With Illness reports add data to show how well plans treat
asthma, diabetes, heart disease, mental health

WASHINGTON—The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has added summary comparative scores to its online “Living with Illness” reports to help users compare how health plans help patients manage select chronic conditions. The Living with Illness reports, a “drill down” feature of NCQA’s Health Plan Report Card (www.healthchoices.org), were introduced earlier this year and show how well plans treat diabetes, cardiac care, asthma and mental illness. The new summary information shows how plans perform overall on groups of measures related to each illness. Living with Illness reports are available for all NCQA-Accredited commercial, Medicare and Medicaid health plans.

“To a person with a serious chronic illness, selecting a health plan that can help you manage your condition is essential,” said Phyllis Torda, NCQA Vice President for Product Development. “The same information is invaluable to employers – it can make the difference between losing a lot of productive time to sick days versus losing very little or even none at all.”

To view a sample report, visit www.healthchoices.org and conduct a search using the “See How Your Plan Rates” feature. Living with Illness reports are located under the “More details” tab. For each condition, plans are compared to other plans in their region. Plans receive a checkmark in one of three columns:

• In the bottom 50 percent of all plans
• Between the 50th and 75th percentile of all plans
• In the top 25 percent of all plans

Plans may also receive an additional checkmark in a fourth box, “Among the top
10% nationally” if their performance warrants inclusion in this group.

The reports also allow users to drill down to view each plan’s scores on selected clinical measures, which are collected as part of every NCQA Accreditation survey. To provide context for the results, the 90th percentile score for performance nationally(or top 10% score) is also provided.

NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations and manages the evolution of HEDIS, the tool the nation’s health plans use to measure and report on their performance. NCQA is committed to providing health care quality information through the Web, media and data licensing agreements in order to help consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices.