At the end of June 2013, Medicare added a new features to its Physician Compare website as it prepares to start including quality data on thousands of doctors. The federal health care law requires the Centers for CMS to publish performance data on doctors, including how patients rate them, how well the physicians’ medical interventions succeed and how well they follow clinical guidelines for basic care.
Physicians and other health professionals have been disheartened with what they’ve found out about themselves on the Medicare Physician Compare website. Name misspellings, locality mistakes and other errors have physicians questioning the integrity and accuracy of the information on the site and wondering if it can become a legitimate comparison tool for healthcare consumers.
Physicians are instructed to update Medicare enrollment information when they find mistakes on the Physician Compare website. Missing or incorrect information is probably caused by: No enrollment record in the Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS). Affected physicians need to submit enrollment applications. A missing address in PECOS, affected physicians need to update their addresses in the system. Out-of-date or missing information regarding a specialty in PECOS. Affected physicians need to update their specialties in the system.
To learn more about the quality information CMS already collects through Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting System, visit http://www.cms.gov/pqri.
To visit the Physician Compare website, visit www.medicare.gov/find-a-doctor
