The data is packaged into four files:
- National Downloadable File: general information on practitioners, including demographics, associated practices, etc.
- Individual Eligible Professional (EP) Public Reporting — Clinical Quality of Care: information on six indicators of healthcare quality
- Group Practice Public Reporting — Clinical Quality of Care: information on fourteen indicators of healthcare quality
- Group Practice Public Reporting — Patient Experience: information on how patients rate the healthcare organization’s performance
- We constructed a base dataset by joining the first and second files mentioned above. While the third and fourth datasets included valuable information not available elsewhere, they had more limited participation. While participation by group practices was lower than individual professionals in 2014, we were able to produce group-level information by combining information on individual practitioners’ screening rates (available in the Individual EP file) with their associated practices (available in the National Downloadable file). After preparing the data, we examined how often screening was reported via PQRS for four important healthcare concerns: depression, tobacco use, unhealthy body weight, and high blood pressure. These reporting rates were grouped by state and mapped onto the continental U.S. For the screening that was reported, we calculated the average screening rate for each condition. Finally, we isolated the data for New York to look closely at the rates of reporting and screening for depression.