The National committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA) has  new report out that funnily enough contrasts strongly with the report from the Harvard academic physicians that I was somewhat cynical about in this post yesterday.  NCQA’s mission is to improve health care via greater accountability and information. Although it’s directors and staff tend to come from the payer rather than the provider side, and its money comes from Foundations and the pharma industry, it has worked hard to maintain academic independence. In my view they have been telling the truth about health care quality all along — really all they have to do is point out the obvious. 

Anyway, enough editorial, the NCQA’s  State of health Care Quality report details what many of us have know for many years.  In order to treat heart disease, diabetes, asthma, etc, etc, etc, as John Mattison from Kaiser told me many years ago "We know what to do, we just don’t know how to make sure it gets done."  The consequence of practice variation away from best standards of care, according to the Peggy O’Kane, NCQA’s President, is "More than 57,000 people will die this year because there is a huge gap between what we know and what we do."  There’s also some 41 million sick days and billions in wasted expenditure ($1.6 billion for heart disease alone). None of this is news, John Wennberg’s Dartmouth Health Atlas has been detailing the extent of practice variation for decades.

The one area where NCQA says there has been improvement is among those health plans where they are actually measuring the impact of treatment protocols. (The report cards that NCQA promotes are part of that effort). Of course, none of this much matters if providers are not being rewarded for improving care quality.  In fact since the "end of managed care" (see my earlier post), the quality improvement movement has been struggling, even though some plans are now paying bonuses based on quality.  In the end the biggest payers (i.e. Medicare, Medicaid, FEHBP) and the government (i.e. Medicare, Medicaid, FEHBP)  must come together to promote compensation for quality if we’re ever going to make progress.  And as shown in the recent JAMA article, the provider industry has plenty of fire power with which to resist.