New York, August 24, 2006
Three years in the making, Care Focused Purchasing, Inc. (CFP) has begun
the aggregation of medical claims data from major insurance carriers and
employers, which ultimately will allow consumers to access performance
information on physicians and hospitals across the US.
CFP is a group of over 50 employers that began meeting in 2003 and
formally incorporated as a not-for-profit entity in mid-2005. These
large employers, many of them Fortune 100 companies, are united in the
belief that the solution to America's health care cost crisis lies in
higher quality and more efficient medical care. Many experts maintain
that poor quality or inappropriate treatment adds 30% or more to total
health care spending in the US each year.
CFP has forged agreements to partner with seven major health plans:
Aetna, CIGNA, FiservHealth, Humana, Preferred Care, Regence BlueShield
and WellPoint (Anthem BlueCross BlueShield). These Partnering Carriers
will provide claims data on more than 18 million members which will be
combined with more than 2 million self-insured lives from the CFP
employers' claims data in a "data warehouse" - a repository of the
results on which provider performance will be measured. While individual
providers and facilities will be identified and measured in the CFP
database, all patient data will be confidential and unidentifiable. The
output of these reports will be delivered to the CFP partnering carriers
in early 2007, in time to be part of the participating plans' products
and services geared for the 2008 cycle.
"CFP output has the potential to provide consumers with a type of robust
consumer report card on physician and hospital performance in a uniform
fashion across plans that simply does not exist today," said Bob Ihrie,
VP of Compensation and Benefits at Lowe's Companies Inc. "The results
provided by CFP will accelerate the ability of partnering plans to
deploy highly credible provider data as they develop tiered networks,
share information with plan members or embark on other strategies to
maximize provider performance."
The foundation of CFP's data aggregation initiative is the promotion of
standard performance measures of provider quality and efficiency. CFP
convened an expert panel of researchers and health plan medical
directors to agree on a set of measures, drawing on work done by such
groups as the National Quality Forum, Leapfrog and NCQA. Designed to
measure physician and hospital performance, CFP Measures Version 1.0 was
approved by the panel and will now be applied to the data in the CFP
data warehouse. One of CFP's primary goals is to achieve transparency in
provider performance. As such, CFP's approach to provider measurement
and scoring will subscribe to this same objective of transparency. CFP's
measures set methodology is entirely transparent and available for those
who wish to review.
"Aetna is proud to be among the seven carriers that are working with the
Care Focused Purchasing employers on this groundbreaking project," said
Jim Foreman, Executive Vice President and Head of National Businesses at
Aetna. "While many groups are diligently working to make better use of
information to improve health care, CFP is the first collaborative that
will actually measure performance across the health care system."
CFP has selected Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to assist in this
large-scale data aggregation project. CSC's role will be to develop and
operate a data warehouse that will receive information from the carriers
and the employers, develop the technical methods to aggregate and
transform the data to produce reports on efficiency and quality, and
host the data warehouse on an ongoing basis. "At CSC, we believe that
the CFP initiative is an essential stepping stone to improving the
quality of care in the market," said Dr. Carl Mankowitz, Partner in
CSC's Global Health Solutions practice. "The CFP members are among the
first to utilize the substantial amount of quality and efficiency data
that can be extracted from national administrative claims data and other
sources. We are excited to team with CFP and to lend our extensive
health care expertise to this market-changing effort."
About Care Focused Purchasing, Inc.
Care Focused Purchasing was created after an initial meeting of
interested employers facilitated by Mercer Health & Benefits LLC in May
2003. The group was legally incorporated as a nonprofit 501(c)
corporation in July 2005. CFP's over 50 member companies include
household names such as:
* Assurant
* Black & Decker
* The Boeing Company
* Corning Incorporated
* Diversified Communications
* Eastman Chemical Company
* Hannaford Bros. Co.
* Lowe's Companies Inc.
* Penske Truck Leasing
* The Procter & Gamble Company
* Smiths Group Americas, LLC
* Sprint Nextel
* Texas Instruments Incorporated
* The Navigators
* Vanguard
* Weyerhaeuser Company
CFP is supported by contributions from employer members and carrier
partners. For more information, contact the Governance Committee at
CFPGovernanceCommittee[at]mercer.com.
About Computer Sciences Corporation
Founded in 1959, Computer Sciences Corporation is a leading global
information technology (IT) services company. CSC's mission is to
provide customers in industry and government with solutions crafted to
meet their specific challenges and enable them to profit from the
advanced use of technology.
With approximately 78,000 employees, CSC provides innovative solutions
for customers around the world by applying leading technologies and
CSC's own advanced capabilities. These include systems design and
integration; IT and business process outsourcing; applications software
development; Web and application hosting; and management consulting.
Headquartered in El Segundo, California, CSC reported revenue of $14.6
billion for the 12 months ending June 30, 2006. For more information,
visit the company's website at www.csc.com.