Bill proposing statewide clinical-claims quality reporting draws praise and privacy questions

Brent Walker of the Medical Association of Georgia told the committee HB 102 aims to combine clinical and claims data into a standardized quality reporting framework so the state can measure outcomes more accurately.

Mike Gable, CEO of McIntosh Clinic, said fragmented payer reporting forces practices to duplicate work across portals, chase documentation and often wait months for feedback; he estimated his internal teams spend about 52 staff-hours per week on quality and reporting tasks. "The lack of standardization and timeliness leads to a loss in patient-facing time," Gable said.

Remote witnesses described functioning systems elsewhere: Austin Gillard of Clay County Medical Center (Kansas) described combining clinical and claims data to track preventive care and medication fills, which he said improved both patient outcomes and the facility’s financial stability. John Demore, a health informatics expert, summarized research showing that integrated data sharing improves the accuracy of quality measurement and reduces misleading comparisons between providers whose data are fragmented.

Committee members raised privacy and open-records questions about lines in the draft bill that address direct personal identifiers and public records. Sponsors and counsel explained the conceptual approach is to protect patient privacy by de-identifying data used for quality measures and to build HIPAA-compliant safeguards into any statewide exchange.

A Department of Community Health official told the committee that Georgia’s all-payers database was built under federal agreements and is maintained in a de-identified format; that configuration limits the database’s ability to perform the person-level matching the presenters described and creates legal and technical constraints DBH would need to resolve before the project could function as described.

Committee members thanked presenters and said staff will continue studying design, privacy and technical options over the summer; HB 102 was not voted on at the hearing.