The NCQA produces The State of Health Care Quality Report every year to focus on key quality issues the United States faces and to drive improvement in the delivery of evidence-based medicine. More than 1,000 health plans voluntarily disclose the clinical quality, customer experience and resource use data that are the report’s foundation. This report documents performance trends over time, tracks variation in care and recommends quality improvements, including for colorectal cancer screening rates. The report showed some wonderful progress on colorectal cancer screening rates with Medicare plans in 2015. Medicare PPO plans jumped from 62.9% in 2014 to 66.7% in 2015 and Medicare HMO plans jumped from 66.5% to 67.4%. Commercial plans, on the other hand, dipped with commercial plan HMO rates at 62.8% and commercial plan PPO rates at 57.1% in 2015, showing that there is still much work for us to do. You can view the colorectal cancer screening HEDIS rate trends here.

We join NCQA in commending all the health plans that contributed data for this report and for the commitment to accountability and quality improvement they show by disclosing their performance.