The Affordable Care Act’s call for a shift to pay for performance is spurring new ways to assess physicians’ performance. MediQuire has jumped in with a tool to track clinicians using metrics such as Medicare measures, guideline standards and comparing performance relative to their peers.
At Blueprint Health’s demo day, the co-founder and CEO Klaus Koenigshausen talked through its approach. It uses data analytics to generate meaningful insights about physician performance to determine what areas need to be fine tuned. MediQuire provides targeted educational content and fosters peer-to-peer mentoring in areas where clinicians show room for quality and cost improvement.
“The current system of chart reviews is not personalized and it’s not tied to an action plan,” Koenigshausen said.
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It also plans to mine electronic health records to see, among other things, how many tests they’re ordering, which gets right at the cost-saving aspect of its service. Hospitals pay the healthcare IT company an annual licensing fee of $100,000 to $200,000. It’s raising $500,000 to increase its hospital customers.
Although the goal is to reduce patient complications and re-admissions that can increase costs, the question is how will hospitals use the information. Will hospitals use the data in the way envisioned? Or will they use it as a punitive measure for physicians? How frequently physicians order tests touches a contentious debate in healthcare on the motivation behind ordering a lot of these tests. Medical necessity? Fear of malpractice? Or well-intentioned but misguided conclusions? At a time when hospitals are looking for ways to save money, it offers a solution but also raises some questions as well. Still, it’s part of a national trend that will produce a variety of approaches.
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