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Participation > QIOs

Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs)

The BTE-QIO partnership is a relationship that is beneficial to all parties involved. It allows both organizations to collaboratively achieve their goals of assisting practices in improving care through a recognition process that ultimately rewards physicians who provide high quality patient care. It also enables physicians to receive the help they need in improving their care.

BTE’s programs and QIO experiences have demonstrated that once physicians/practices have been engaged in improvement initiatives within their organization, they require assistance from external resources in their quality improvement efforts. QIOs are critical to physicians and practices because they make available the tools necessary for quality improvements that allow qualification for BTE rewards. By working on a collaborative level practices can gain a deep understanding of how to most effectively engage in re-engineering. In addition, because the QIOs are focused on healthcare delivered at the local level, they understand market dynamics and the culture of medicine in their communities, which allows them to operate more efficiently and effectively as catalysts of change.

Furthermore, harmonization of measures within markets is a core BTE principle. This helps reduce duplicative reporting burden on physicians and practices, by rewarding practices that invest in IT solutions and practice change as a means to better patient care.

The QIO can aim to serve a variety of roles in the state:

1. Playing a “traditional” QIO role by assisting practices in the adoption and effective use of health IT, or in practices’ quality improvement efforts, specifically in the areas of cardiac and diabetes care;
   
   
2. Serving as an independent regional Performance Assessment Organization (PAO) that assesses practices in their quality improvement efforts in order to qualify for rewards through the BTE Physician Office Link (POL) program;
   
   
3. Providing guidance and information on how to participate in BTE programs, thereby further encouraging practice re-engineering in the overall market.
   
   
4. Serving as a market convener by gathering all necessary parties required to offer pay-for-performance programs in the particular market.

For more information on QIO participation in BTE, refer to the QIO Toolkit.

Current BTE Participating QIOs

Currently both MassPRO, Massachusett's Quality Improvement Organization, and IPRO, New York's Quality Improvement Organization, serve as performance assessment organizations (PAOs) for BTE's Physician Office Link program.  Both organizations work with a number of physician practices on the Doctor's Office Quality-Information Technology (DOQ-IT) initiative, a program funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that is designed to assist physician practices in the adoption and implementation of health information technology. Physicians enrolled in both BTE and DOQ-IT are able to achieve recognition for the Physician Office Link program through these QIOs.

View a list of QIOs by state.