Recent commentary has included:
All aboard the PIP QI exemption! But hang on, who is liable and who pays?
An increasing number of practice managers and owners are expressing concern and confusion of the Department of Health’s latest attempt to bridge the complexity around how a practice will share de-identified data with its PHN in order to qualify for the PIP QI.
In a possible acknowledgement that the new PIP QI data scheme needs a lot more time and thinking on the part of all parties in order to sort out governance, security, and in some cases, practice technology, the department early this week sent an email to practices titled: “Urgent – PIP QI Time Limited Extension Update”.
The exemption extension email provides a form for practices to complete which still wish to receive their PIP QI for data delivery to their PHN, but aren’t able to deliver the data because either their technology is not capable, or they don’t have a suitable understanding or agreement with their PHN in place.
In order to be eligible for the extension for the last quarter of this year, you only have until October 15 to make your decision on signing, and thereafter you will need to exempt yourself in January, April and July, if you want the full extension.
If you win an exemption you can get your PIP QI payment without submitting any data as far out as July 31 next year.
But, if you are not exempting because you simply aren’t going to provide data, you have to agree to start working in earnest on a way to get the appropriate technology and contracts in place with your PHN in the meantime.
Lots more here:
And this:
PHN data arrangements a bit of a mess
September 27, 2019
GP bodies remain uneasy with data-sharing arrangements under the Practice Incentive Payment – Quality Improvement, despite having won a reprieve of sorts without sacrificing the payments promised.
GP bodies remain uneasy with data-sharing arrangements under the Practice Incentive Payment – Quality Improvement, despite having won a reprieve of sorts without sacrificing the payments promised.
The Australian GP Alliance (AGPA) and the RACGP say the incentive scheme is poorly designed, insecure and unready, but that the Health Department is “holding a financial gun to GPs’ heads”.
Worth up to $50,000 a year for the largest practices, the PIP QI requires the sharing of deidentified patient data with your Primary Health Network using data-extraction software supplied by the PHN, such as Polar or Pen CAT.
The data, which is deidentified before it leaves the practice, will be analysed at the PHN stage to yield 10 improvement measures (including the proportion of patients with smoking status recorded, the proportion of female patients with up-to-date cervical screening, and so on). The data will then be sent to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for national-level analysis.
The program went live on August 1 after several delays. The Health Department told The Medical Republic that in the first three weeks 4023 practices had registered for the incentive, or more than 65% of accredited general practices.
After the AGPA complained in July that the program risked compromising patient privacy and commercially sensitive information, the Health Department released a fact sheet clarifying the requirements, including the option to seek a time-limited exemption.
With the exemption, a practice that wishes to participate but does not wish to use the PHN-supplied software has, at most, 12 months in which to implement an acceptable alternative. During that year “practices will need to work in partnership with their local PHN to meet the other requirements of the PIP QI Incentive” but will not have to share any data, and they will still receive quarterly payments.
Lots more here:
It certainly seems all the kinks have not quite been sorted! Those suffering should however consider this from the US
Health plans need to better use tech to simplify quality initiatives
October 04, 2019, 3:41 p.m. EDT
Value-based care depends on measuring and reporting outcomes, but doing so is causing burnout in physicians.
That additional challenge for physicians comes despite widespread efforts to reduce this burden, according to a new survey of 23 health plans conducted by Harrisburg, Penn.-based Geneia, an analytic solutions and services company.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that there are more than 500 provider quality measures—with little overlap between the measures that insurers need or the 1,700 measures used by government agencies, Geneia says.
“It is no surprise that 86 percent of physicians cite the ‘heightened demand for data reporting to support quality measures’ as a top driver of physician burnout, and view multiple and duplicative quality measures as one of the main barriers to accepting downside risk and moving into value-based care arrangements,” authors of the study say.
"Undoubtedly, healthcare quality matters and measuring quality performance does too," says Shelley Riser, Geneia's vice president of consulting services and clinical innovations. "There's also no doubt that we can—and must—do much better in reducing the burden of quality performance on health plans and their physician partners."
In its new report, titled, “Take Control of Quality Performance: Three Proven Strategies for Health Plans,” Geneia takes the findings from the survey offers these three tips on how to health plans can better manage data collection and help physicians stay in it for the long haul in value-based care.
Lots more here:
No wonder US clinicians are burning out with that level of information request.
Australian GPs should feel either lucky or terrified of what might come!
David.
3 comments:
.... "a practice that wishes to participate but does not wish to use the PHN-supplied software has, at most, 12 months in which to implement an acceptable alternative" ....
Some questions:
1. Who developed the PHN-supplied software and who supports the software?
2. How many different types of PHN-supplied software are there?
3. Does the practice incur any costs / charges (eg. s/w support) associated with the PHN-supplied software?
1) Has the clinical software and extraction tools been evaluated for equivalence? Because (a) different data structures, forms, terminology sets, classifications used by software affects the output; and (b) methods used by extraction tools may provide vastly different statistics using a test sample of patients?
2) Has the GP's been tested to verify they can all enter data with the same standard of accuracy, completeness and interoperability?
3) What efforts are being made to improve data accuracy, completeness and interoperability?
4) Are these efforts being subsidised?
GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out
These extraction tools search for codes, terms, keywords, abbreviations, prescriptions, spelling mistakes and other hints to tag patients as probably having a specific diagnosis.
Is this a female patient with diabetes that pre-existed the current pregnancy or is this gestational diabetes so is only temporary? These kinds of details changes prevalence estimates and health system cost estimates.
A better way is to target a smaller representative samples of patients for better quality data not glue a GP to the keyboard & screen.
Great questions. I wonder who at the PHN is qualified to handle sensitive data of this nature? What ASD classification is it? And are the systems at the PHN of equal of higher classification. Don’t want data spills happening.
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