Better Quality Information (BQI) Pilot

What We Did:

MHQP was selected to be one of three collaborative quality organizations across the country that would serve as pilot sites for the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance (AQA). The goal of the pilot program was to test the feasibility of using quality measures approved by AQA to assess the quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries, commercially insured individuals and Medicaid recipients.  The effort became the Better Quality Information (BQI) project when AQA merged efforts with the Hospital Quality Alliance.

Each pilot site was expected to aggregate, where possible, claims data for its states’ Medicare beneficiaries, commercially insured patients and Medicaid recipients in order to create individual physician results and to report these results to physicians and then, as appropriate, publicly.

MHQP identified and developed acceptable mechanisms to provide physicians with actionable data feedback.

Who Was Involved:

Support for the pilot projects came through CMS Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) funds. To meet federal requirements CMS contracted with Delmarva, a QIO, which in turn contracted with each pilot site.

Why This Work Matters:

Efforts such as this to combine Medicare and commercial data have the potential to enable evaluators and policy-makers to view trends and evaluate improvement efforts across the entire population, not just a segment of the population.