Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP) will release comparative data on clinical quality performance measures to Massachusetts physicians and health plans and to the public in the winter, 2007. MHQP is a non-profit organization with an established record of providing actionable performance data for physicians and consumers in support of efforts to improve the quality of health care services delivered to Massachusetts residents.

MHQP has been sharing information on clinical quality performance measures with physicians and health plans since 2003, in its annual Statewide Comparative Clinical Quality Report (SCCQR). For the fourth year, this report will provide performance results for physicians based on HEDIS reporting measures collected from MHQP participating health plans and aggregated at the practice site, medical group, and physician network levels. Five of Massachusetts largest health plans have collaborated with MHQP in this process, including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Tufts Health Plan, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and Health New England.

New Measures

MHQP has added some new measures to its clinical reporting for both the SCCQR release of data and the public release. New to the 2006 SCCQR release are two measures on beta-blocker treatment after a heart attack and one measure for imaging studies for lower back pain. Three measures that were new to last year’s 2005 SCCQR will be included in public reporting this year. They include testing for children with upper respiratory infection and pharyngitis and colorectal cancer screening.

Public Release of Clinical Data Continues at the Medical Group
In February of 2006, for the first time, MHQP publicly released aggregated clinical performance results for 160 medical groups in Massachusetts. This year MHQP will continue to publicly report at the medical group level. MHQP will not report individual physician results to the public.

For more information on MHQP and clinical quality reporting visit www.mhqp.org.