Physician Voluntary Reporting Program (PVRP)
NOTE: This page refers to a discontinued program, the Physician Voluntary Reporting Program or PVRP. In January 2007, the PVRP program was transitioned to the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI). This Web page is unchanged to serve as a record of the previous program. The information below is not current.
PVRP Background
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), announced in October 2005 the launch of its Physician Voluntary Reporting Program (PVRP). The PVRP is a first step toward reporting information on physician quality of care.
At the end of December 2005, CMS announced a simplified core set of 16 performance measures for the program after receiving feedback from national physician organizations. Organizations including the National Quality Forum (NQF), the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance, the AMA Physician Consortium for Quality Improvement, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and RAND worked to help provide the basis for the selection of the PVRP measures.
Physicians have been able to begin reporting quality data on the evidence-based measures since January 2006.
PVRP builds on CMS’ successful implementation of reporting mechanisms for nursing homes, home health agencies and hospitals, with a goal of substantially improving the health and well-being of Medicare beneficiaries and others nationwide. Given the need for evidence-based quality measures to help improve the quality of health care services, this voluntary program can help Medicare and physicians become better positioned to transition to a system that promotes higher quality and rewards better health care delivery.
The PVRP is designed to provide physicians with useful feedback on improving performance on reported measures, as well as to build an increasingly accurate reporting system using physician feedback from this first phase. Once the PVRP system is fully developed, it will eventually be used to compensate physicians for the quality—rather than the quantity—of care they provide.
CMS Administrator Mark B. McClellan, M.D., Ph.D, has described the creation of PVRP as a dynamic process. “We listened to our physician partners and together we are improving quality of health care for all Americans—not just Medicare beneficiaries. PVRP cannot succeed without the commitment and support of the physician organizations and I am grateful for their positive impact on our collaborative efforts.”
Eventually, electronic health records (EHRs) will greatly facilitate clinical data reporting and performance improvement, but adoption is not currently widespread. Physicians participating with 
Primaris and other Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) in the Doctor’s Office Quality-Information Technology (DOQ-IT) project, and using electronic health records (EHRs), can report information through electronic submission into the QIO data warehouse.
CMS has also created an interim model for the PVRP that will utilize a pre-existing reporting system to minimize the burden of reporting on physicians and staff. Physicians may begin providing voluntary information through a defined set of Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes, called G-codes (and when they are available, CPT II codes), which are reported on physician claim forms.
Medicare recognizes that many physicians already acknowledge the importance of such measures for the management of patient care, providing CMS with a strong starting point for the voluntary program. For more on PVRP, including a complete listing of the PVRP quality measures, please visit http://www.cms.hhs.gov/PVRP.
CMS' PVRP mailboxes are:
pvrp@cms.hhs.gov or prit@cms.hhs.gov