'Fiscal cliff' law to affect Medicare's quality reporting

A provision of the so-called "fiscal cliff" legislation would encourage healthcare providers to use electronic registries to do quality reporting, notes Peter Orszag, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a recent Bloomberg article. Orszag interprets this provision as promoting registries to improve the quality of care, partly by comparing the outcomes of different treatments. However, the evidence points to a more targeted agenda, at least in the short term.