From Boston.com:
The Massachusetts Medical Society yesterday sought to derail a two-year-old plan under which physicians are ranked for cost and quality measures by health plans associated with the Group Insurance Commission, the agency that oversees health insurance for thousands of public employees at state and local levels.. . .
Dr. Bruce S. Auerbach, president of the powerful medical society, said efforts to improve the tiering program, part of the insurance commission's Clinical Performance Improvement initiative, have failed.
"There is a right way to do this, and a wrong way - and the Clinical Performance Improvement initiative is definitely not the right way," said Auerbach in a statement.
"We have worked with the GIC for four years to improve its program, and the agency has made changes in some limited areas. However, the GIC has refused to correct the CPI's most glaring problem, which is its ranking of individual physicians using inaccurate, unreliable, and invalid tools and data."
. . .
Dolores L. Mitchell, executive director for the Group Insurance Commission, called the doctors' actions "regrettable."
. . .
Mitchell said she had invited the medical society to join its physician advisory committee, which met periodically to work through problems with physician tiering.
"We agreed to a lot of the suggestions they made," said Mitchell, "but not all of them. They apparently wanted us to agree with all of them."
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