Calling for greater transparency and better consumer information in order to increase quality and hold down rising health care costs, Governor Tim Pawlenty and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt today called on public and private sector partners to ramp up efforts to reform health care delivery across the nation.

Secretary Leavitt is meeting with multiple community leaders in Minneapolis today, including the Minnesota Community Measurement Program, to discuss ways to measure and report on physician practice in a meaningful and transparent way for consumers and purchasers of healthcare.

“People have a right to know the quality of the care they are receiving and its cost,” Secretary Leavitt said. “Governor Pawlenty’s initiative is an important step toward making the health care system better in Minnesota. I look forward to continuing our work together to synchronize our efforts on the national and state level.”

QCare – Quality Care and Rewarding Excellence – is a new way for the state to purchase health care announced by Governor Pawlenty last week. QCare serves as a new quality standard that will be used to reward top performing providers while saving millions of dollars in health care costs.

“Secretary Leavitt is a great champion of information transparency, which allows consumers to know how much they’re paying for healthcare services and the quality of care they receive,” Governor Pawlenty said. “QCare provides such transparency on a state level, and answers Secretary Leavitt’s call for reporting and rewarding the highest quality health care in Minnesota. We both recognize the need to avoid unnecessary or harmful care and to deliver the right care at the right price.”

The State of Minnesota will lead by example in applying QCare to all state purchased health care – now $4 billion annually – through programs such as Medical Assistance, Minnesota Care, and Minnesota Advantage - the state employee health plan. All state contracts with health plans and health care providers will contain significant new incentives and requirements for greater reporting of costs and quality of care delivered, for meeting targets and goals, for improvements in key areas, and for greater overall accountability and results.

The Minnesota Community Measurement Program, a nonprofit entity dedicated to improving the quality of healthcare in the state, is one of six sites selected to receive federal support to encourage collection of quality and cost data for healthcare providers in that region. The project is funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The Minnesota program’s purpose is to demonstrate the aggregation of data across the Medicare fee-for-service and commercial populations, test methods to measure performance, and identify methods to communicate the results to the public. Minnesota Community Measurement already publicly reports over 40 clinical quality measures. This aggregated data set will allow reporting on an expanded set of quality measures, patient experience, as well as hospital and cost measures. The additional data will also allow Minnesota Community Measurement to move from medical group-level reporting to clinic-level reporting.

Until recently, one roadblock to measuring and reporting performance at the physician level has been that it is conducted piecemeal. Physicians with patients covered by various public and private programs have their performance measured separately, often against different sets of measures for each group. This pilot project will give the Minnesota Community Measurement program comprehensive data that can be used to inform consumers and change the way we pay for health care.

QCare, meanwhile, goes even further for Minnesotans, and takes this data and applies new performance standards to reward those high quality providers who are recognized as top performers while saving millions of dollars in health care costs. The Minnesota Department of Health estimates that if QCare standards are met, more than $150 million in health care costs will be saved annually.

QCare builds on current initiatives to measure health care quality in Minnesota:
· Governor Pawlenty’s Health Cabinet unveiled www.minnesotahealthinfo.org to provide consumers with information on health care costs and quality in Minnesota.
· Minnesota leads the country in a collaborative approach between health plans, medical groups, physicians, patients, and employers working together through MN Community Measurement.
· The Minnesota Nursing Home Report Card is an online tool for Minnesota consumers to compare quality of life and resident satisfaction at the state’s 396 Medical Assistance certified nursing homes.
· Governor Pawlenty launched the Smart Buy Alliance – a unique public-private partnership of health care purchasers in Minnesota.
· RxPrice Compare allows consumers to comparison shop prescription drug prices at more than 1,000 local pharmacies using a new feature on the state’s nation-leading prescription drug Web site.

Download Governor Pawlenty's latest podcast to learn more about Consumber Driven Health Care.