Medicare pay-for-reporting effort draws fire from frustrated doctors

Some worry that doctors will leave the program rather than continue to contend with its flaws. By David Glendinning, AMNews staff. Oct. 6, 2008. Medicare's flagship Physician Quality Reporting Initiative has left in its wake a sea of annoyed physicians who say the pay-for-reporting program is being poorly managed by an unresponsive administration. In July, more than a year after nearly 100,000 doctors started reporting quality measures to Medicare for the first time, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services started sending out the first of more than 55,000 bonus checks to those who reported enough measures to qualify in 2007. In August, CMS began allowing participants access to confidential reports to let them know if they achieved the reporting threshold for the measures they chose -- or by how much they fell short. So far, the reviews from doctors on both processes have been largely dismal.