AMA opposes Medicare physician voluntary reporting program.(News)

DALLAS -- Predicting more administrative burdens and an eventual mandate on performance measures, delegates at the interim meeting of the American Medical Association's House of Delegates voted to oppose the federal government's plans to implement a voluntary quality reporting program for Medicare.

Delegates adopted a report from the AMA's board of trustees that strongly objected to the coming system, and offered to assist the government in correcting the program's "strong deficiencies."

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced the "Physician Voluntary Reporting Program" in late October, and said that the new initiative would avoid unnecessary costs and improve quality of care.

Beginning next month, physicians who choose to participate will voluntarily send information to CMS about the quality of care they provide to beneficiaries. They will receive feedback on their performance from the agency as early as next summer.

In its report and in a letter to CMS administrator Mark B. McClellan, M.D., AMA trustees expressed doubts that the new system will improve the quality of health care.

"The physician community has made a good faith effort to develop, endorse, and implement physician performance measures," some in collaboration with CMS, the letter said. "However, the excessive administrative requirements that this program will impose on physicians could doom this initiative."

The program would force primary care physicians with an already busy patient load to develop a new reporting system from scratch, said Joseph Zebley, M.D., a delegate from the American Academy of Family Physicians, during committee debate on the board's report.