Members of Congress like Obama's tech proposals to track health quality, fraud

Former House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-MI) praised a proposal in President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget request that would make it possible to cull data from claims in systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to measure quality of health care and to link payments to performance.

The fiscal 2011 budget released on Monday recommends $110 million go toward transforming the CMS data collection system from an infrastructure that merely processes claims to one that can analyze and share health care performance data. The goal is to use the resulting assessments, in part, to promote value-based purchasing, a contracting approach that ties provider and plan payments to the quality of care provided. At Thursday's hearing on the president's budget, Rep Dingell pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to make sure the department commits to sustaining the project and holds contractors accountable to avoid the numerous system modernization failures he has witnessed during his five decades-long career.