The State of Health Care Quality Report 2013 from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) was released in October and shows trends in how managed care plans deliver care. These reports each year are a rich source of data for health care journalists. The latest report is based on 2012 data from NCQA’s Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS), a performance improvement tool that health plans use to report quality scores to their employer clients. In 2012, NCQA collected HEDIS data from 1,151 health plans, a 9 percent increase over the 1,057 plans that participated in 2011. HEDIS scores covered a record 136 million people, or 43 percent of Americans.
The report provides information on rates of overuse and appropriateness of procedures, rates on the management of patients with chronic conditions, measures of care for children and adolescents, and measures of care for adults. The appendices report on rates of variation in plan performance, and aggregate data from HEDIS and from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey.