On April 17, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced new data reporting options for its voluntary Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) in 2008. As an alternative to submitting quality data as part of their Medicare claims, the program will allow physicians and other eligible professionals to submit the data through a medical registry, which will report the data to CMS. They also can choose to report data on individual measures, or on group measures that capture multiple data elements about common care processes for diabetes, kidney disease and preventive medicine. Those who report using groups of measures can start reporting in July and still be eligible to earn an incentive payment for 2008.

For more details, go to http://www.cms.hhs.gov/apps/media/press/release.asp.