July 28, 2006
PPO Benchmark Data, New HEDIS® Measures Highlighted in 11th Edition of NCQA's Quality Compass®
Online database of health plan performance offers data on 253 health plan products enrolling 46 million Americans
WASHINGTON—The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) today released the latest update of its online Quality Compass®. Quality Compass 2006 includes comparative performance information on several new measures of care and service. For the first time, Quality Compass 2006 will add preferred provider organization (PPO) national benchmark data. Quality Compass includes NCQA Accreditation and plan-specific HEDIS® results on more than 250 commercial health plan products; data for Medicaid managed care plans will be available in September.
Until recently, no standardized data to compare PPO performance has existed. The 2006 edition of Quality Compass will include PPO benchmark data which will be added to the database in the fall. In response to growing interest from employers and consumers in PPO plans, nearly 80 PPOs have collected and reported at least some clinical quality or customer satisfaction data to NCQA over the past two years. NCQA released HEDIS PPO measure specifications for public comment earlier this summer, and will release final specifications in October.
Quality Compass 2006 also includes audited HEDIS and CAHPS data for four new clinical measures, including Use of Imaging Studies for Low Back Pain. Back pain is the nation’s leading cause of disability for people under the age of 45, and affects 31 million people annually at a cost of $50 billion to $100 billion annually. This measure determines whether imaging studies such as MRIs, x-rays or CT scans are appropriately used in evaluating patients with lower back pain.
Other new measures in Quality Compass 2006 include:
- Call Abandonment
- Call Answer Timeliness
- Persistence of Beta-Blocker Treatment after a Heart Attack
“Health care quality professionals have long relied on Quality Compass as the industry standard for comparing the performance of health plans and identifying long-term trends in clinical quality,” said Jennifer Benjamin, NCQA Director of Information Products. “The addition of PPO benchmark data will help drive quality improvement in a sector of the industry for which we haven’t had much information to date.”
Employers, health plans and others can use Quality Compass to directly compare a health plan’s HEDIS and CAHPS® scores to those of other health plans or to national and regional benchmarks. The new edition allows users to view multiple benchmarks in one report. Users can also export their search results to a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet for further analysis using the additional Data Exporter option; the 2006 edition has expanded exporting capabilities so users can export up to 15 measures with one click of the mouse. Plan-specific Medicaid results and member-level commercial CAHPS data will be released as separate Excel or SAS® files.
The database forms the basis for NCQA’s annual State of Health Care Quality report. The 2006 State of Health Care Quality report will be released on September 27. Local data is available to reporters on an embargoed basis prior to the report’s release.
Quality Compass 2006 and its optional electronic data files can be ordered online through NCQA’s Web site, www.ncqa.org, or by calling (888) 275-7585.
NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations, recognizes physicians and physician groups in key clinical areas 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.
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