Medical Practice Trends

The new federal pay-for-performance pilot program may prove to be short-lived.On December 20, 2006, President Bush signed into law the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 (TRHCA). A broad tax reform omnibus that also included a number of key health care measures, the bill authorized the establishment of a pay-for-performance program known as the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI). According to the website of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, PQRI establishes a financial incentive of up to 1.5% of the total allowed charges for covered Medicare physician fee schedule services for eligible professionals whose performance meets a designated set of quality measures.

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