L. Gregory Pawlson, MD, MPH

Compared with traditional Medicare, relative resource use for those with diabetes or cardiovascular disease is lower in Medicare Advantage, while quality of care is higher.

This study examines variation among health plans in resource use and quality of care for patients with diabetes mellitus or cardiovascular disease.

Although physicians should be aware of guidelines and measures, they need to apply more nuanced approaches when seeing individual patients.

Integrated care systems allegedly provide better care. This study of 97 large medical groups nationally provides suggestive evidence that this may be true.

Typical health plan data provide limited information for benchmarking physician performance using even a less stringent rule for attributing patient measures to physicians.

The Physician Practice Connections-Readiness Survey can identify practice systems that are associated with higher rates of quality diabetes care.