Date and Time
April 30, 2003
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

A number of studies suggest that collecting quality data about health plans is of limited value because consumers make only limited use of quality information in their health plan choices. However, this does not address another potential benefit of collecting quality data. In areas where quality data is collected, medical practice patterns may change correspondingly, improving the practice of medicine throughout the area. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which quality reporting activity among managed care plans within an area affects area level health care delivery patterns. We study a nationally representative sample of individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance living in metropolitan areas during 1996-1999 who were candidates for HEDIS measured services. We link information from the National Committee for Quality Assurance about which health plans collect HEDIS data with information about plan enrollment, creating market-level measures of the share of the population enrolled in health plans that collected HEDIS data for 1996-1999. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for the corresponding years to measure rates of use of four services included in the HEDIS measures: breast cancer and cervical cancer screening, eye exams for diabetics, and annual check-ups for adults. We estimate linear probability models of the relationship between market-level HEDIS quality reporting activity and use of the four services among individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance. We find that the prevalence of quality measurement activity in an area is positively related to utilization rates for some, but not all of the HEDIS performance indicators we study. The implication of our findings is that health plan quality measurement and reporting activity may drive changes in health care delivery. This suggests that quality data collection can have beneficial impacts on health care even if consumers do not actively use health plan quality information when making health plan choices. Thus, studies that focus only on consumer awareness and use of quality information may understate its effectiveness.