Quality Data, Quality Healthcare Act Reintroduced

Senators Baldwin (WI) and Thune (SD) reintroduced their “Quality Data, Quality Healthcare Act” today, which aims at providing greater access to medicare and medicaid claims by modernizing and reforming the Qualified Entity (QE) program, which according to the Senators is too restrictive in its current form with respect to which organizations can participate and what QEs can do with the data once they are in the program.

The new legislation would make two major changes to the QE program:

1.  Allow QE organizations receiving Medicare data to analyze and redistribute the data to authorized subscribers (insurers, health systems, and physicians) so that subscribers can make more informed decisions
2. Permit those entities to charge a voluntary fee to their subscribers so that the organizations can conduct robust analyses to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs.

Click Here to read the full summary of how this new legislation will impact the QE program.