Smart Health-Care Strategy Hidden in ‘Cliff’ Deal
This article is for subscribers only.
Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- One little-noted provision I wasencouraged to see tucked in last week’s fiscal-cliff legislationis Section 601(b): an incentive for doctors to expand their useof something called clinical data registries.
These registries collect information on patientcharacteristics, patterns of care and outcomes that can becrucial to evaluating what medical techniques and strategieswork and which ones don’t. Unfortunately, registries are not aswidespread as they should be -- and the ones that exist oftenare limited to particular types of care.