Health policy experts and lawmakers believe that measuring and publicly reporting information about the performance of physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers is critical to improving health care quality and controlling costs. Advancing health information access and transparency is a goal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) ^[1], which includes a number of provisions to incentivize quality measurement and reporting and to enable more informed consumer decision-making. Across the country, community organizations, such as the Alliances participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative, have been demonstrating the power of using private payer and Medicaid medical claims data to measure and publicly report on provider performance. Their work could be further strengthened by access to Medicare claims data because it is the single largest pool of information about how health care is delivered in America. Combining Medicare data with data from other public and private payers such as Medicaid and employer sponsored plans, holds the potential to generate more complete and accurate provider performance measurement information, thereby further empowering consumer engagement and quality improvement.

Health policy experts and lawmakers believe that measuring and publicly reporting information about the performance of physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers is critical to improving health care quality and controlling costs. Advancing health information access and transparency is a goal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), which includes a number of provisions to incentivize quality measurement and reporting and to enable more informed consumer decision-making.