Dive Brief:
- The National Committee for Quality Assurance has moved from its former ranking system for health insurance plans to a new ratings system akin to CMS' Five-Star Quality Rating System.
- NCQA says the update brings their strategy more in line with that of the government's strategy for reporting on quality and performance.
- The committee recently released its ratings of more than 1,300 plans based on clinical quality, member satisfaction and NCQA Accreditation Survey results.
Dive Insight:
Rankings became an outdated way to measure plans because there are now so many plans measuring and disclosing results that the differences between their places had grown small, NCQA spokesman Andy Reynolds told Modern Healthcare.
"This new way of rating plans emphasizes care outcomes (the results of care people receive) and what patients say about their care," the ratings site states.
The ratings cover commercial, Medicare and Medicaid plans and provide a rating between one and five, with five being the highest. Those ratings are based on member satisfaction, prevention and treatment, with measures assigned different weights: process measures receive a weight of 1, patient experience measures receive a weight of 1.5, and outcome measures receive a weight of 3.
As Modern Healthcare notes, numerous nonprofit insurers performed the best across all three categories while numerous investor-owned insurers received lower ratings.