Public reporting of quality information on medicaid health plans

INTRODUCTION The IOM (2001) identified transparency as the seventh rule for redesigning the health care system for the 21st century, stating that information should be made available to patients and [...]
Transparency through public reporting of quality data is key to achieving the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) vision for 21st century health care. This article reviews the status of States' voluntary public reporting of Medicaid managed care (MMC) quality data, and analyzes these data. Twenty-one States, including 17 of the 20 largest managed care States, have made plan-level data publicly available online, although the data are sometimes thin, with few measures reported, hard-to-access, and old. We conclude that CMS could better leverage the power of public reporting for quality improvement (QI) by increasing the visibility of health plan employer data and information set (HEDIS®) data that States already collect.