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Amid the flurry of pay-for-performance activity, a grow ing number of providers hope to develop tools to measure and monitor contract performance at the functional and operational levels of the organization. That’s where the payer report card comes in. "The payer report card is really a contract management system," said Richard O’Donnell, director of payer relations for Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, MI, during a December managed care contracting conference in Boston. Collecting all of the data and being able to stand back and look at the big picture gives providers more informa tion and thus more leverage in negotiating their contracts with health plans.