Sustained superior performance by a medical care provider, which can be used as a reference to raise the mainstream of care for Medicare beneficiaries. The relative definition of superior will vary from situation to situation. In many instances, an appropriate benchmark would be a provider that appears in the top 10% of all providers for more than a year. Factors that are looked at to determine what to benchmark are physician productivity, practice efficiency, revenue generation, coding performance, and collections. A practice management system can be used to generate reports on the most important factors at regular intervals.
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A benchmark is a claim reporting or payment pattern derived from external sources.