Mercer's Care Focused Purchasing plan, a joint effort with 28 large US employers, was called "one of the most ambitious efforts yet to provide health-care quality ratings for consumers" in a 25 March 2004 article in the Wall Street Journal.

The article describes a ground-breaking effort to use claims data provided by insurance carriers to measure how individual physicians stack up against well-established and generally accepted quality standards based on medical evidence.

Although the scorecard format is still in the development phase, employers in the program hope to provide within a year or so something as simple as a Consumer Report or Zagat type of guide, ranking doctors as well as hospitals with easy-to-understand points and stars, says David Rahill of Mercer Human Resource Consulting, who is acting as project leader.

The effort was also covered by the CNN Financial News program “Money & Markets,” National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Dow Jones Business News.

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