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Area Medical Groups Honored for Performance, Quality Improvement
San Francisco Business Times
by Chris Rauber
Friday, October 12, 2007
Forty-seven of the 235 California medical groups that participated in the Integrated Healthcare Association's nationally recognized Pay for Performance bonus program last year have been recognized as top performers.
Separately, seven other groups won Ronald P. Bangasser quality-improvement awards for improvements made between 2005 and last year, the Oakland-based IHA announced late last week.
Physicians Medical Group of San Jose was the Bay Area's Bangasser award winner, according to the IHA, which coordinates the P4P program. Quality improvement honorees received the newly named Ronald P. Bangasser, M.D., Memorial Award for Quality Improvement, which recognizes the late Dr. Bangasser, who died of cancer earlier this year. Bangasser was a former president of the California Medical Association and chaired IHA'a P4P technical quality committee.
Overall, medical groups participating in the IHA program represent about 40,000 doctors with some 12 million patients. Bonus payments are made directly to participating medical groups and independent practice associations or IPAs by health insurance plans such as Aetna, Blue Cross of California, Blue Shield of California, Cigna and Health Net, which cumulatively paid $55 million in these bonuses last year.
The nonprofit association, led by Executive Director Tom Williams, says its pay-for-performance program is the largest in the nation; critics contend that the relatively small bonuses that groups and individual physicians obtain through P4P aren't significant enough to encourage them to make tough changes in how they practice medicine.
Medical groups or IPAs that finished in the top 20 percent of the IHA rankings, based on 2006 performance, qualified as top performers. In the Bay Area, they included:
- Affinity Medical Group, based in Foster City.
- Mountain View's Camino Medical Group, which is affiliated with Sutter Health.
- San Ramon-based Hill Physicians Medical Group's East Bay operations.
- John Muir Physician Network, based in Walnut Creek.
- Burlingame's Mills-Peninsula Medical Group, also part of Sacramento-based Sutter.
- The Palo Alto Medical Foundation's Palo Alto division, also a Sutter affiliate.
- Seven of Kaiser Permanente's Bay Area Permanente Medical Group units, including those in the outer East Bay (Tri-Valley area), East Bay, southern Alameda County, Marin-San Rafael, Redwood City, San Francisco, Santa Clara-Milpitas-Campbell-Mountain View, San Jose-Gilroy, and South San Francisco.
Notable omissions from the Bay Area list were San Francisco's Brown & Toland Medical Group, the Emeryville-based Alta Bates Medical Group and the Santa Clara County IPA, commonly known as SCCIPA, among others.
In the Sacramento-North geographic region, Hill Physicians also finished among the top groups, as did four Permanente Medical Group units, and several Sutter Health-affiliated groups, plus Woodland Healthcare/Woodland Clinic Medical Group.
(Posted November 21, 2007)