Big names attend P4P conference

The first national pay for performance (P4P) conference wrapped in Los Angeles on Wednesday morning. Tuesday saw the big guns coming out, with Carolyn Clancy (head of the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality), Mark McLellan of CMS and health IT czar David Brailer all presenting. It's clear that Medicare is very interested in adopting pay-for-performance, with a little more money included for hospital quality reporting in the most recent budget.

Measuring P4P in the physician world requires agreement on measures and deployment of electronic records. Brailer suggested that certification of software applications is a key step to getting more physicians to adopt them. However, a roundtable of physician, employers and health plan leaders confirmed that there is still a long way to go before we have agreement over measures and money. The fact that there were 700 attendees at a conference originally expecting only 300 indicates that there is great interest in the P4P phenomenon.

- see this blog entry from the Health Care Blog

PLUS: Presenters from Cisco, Oracle and Intel, and San Francisco's Brown & Toland medical group indicated that more external support is needed for physicians to adopt IT and improve their processes even in the most IT-sophisticated parts of the nation. As reported in FierceHealthcare last week, the three tech giants will be offering limited funding to physician organizations to support IT use. Release

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