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PacifiCare of Washington is confident that if hospitals and doctors can realistically compare their costs and procedures, they will have the means and incentive to improve medical care.
PacifiCare is offering its hospital and medical group network partners just that kind of information. Comparing healthcare providers' performance is called "profiling," and the Mercer Island-based health service contractor isn't the first healthcare organization or plan to try it.
What's different this time is that PacifiCare is using stategenerated data that provides more comparison points.
For the past three years, PacifiCare has offered health-care provider profiles based on its own internally collected data. But with only 19 percent market penetration in the state, the company wanted to broaden the data collection beyond its own experience.
PacifiCare found the perfect vehicle: a statewide reporting system managed by the Department of Health since 1989. By using the state's Comprehensive Hospital Abstract Reporting System, known as CHARS, PacifiCare can look at hospitals' diagnoses, procedures and charges.
PacifiCare medical director Geoffrey MacPherson hopes that sharing this information with its network hospitals and medical groups will boost performance through a kind of peer pressure dynamic.
"What we are...