The proportion of medicare physicians who self-report on the quality of their care to the PQRS system grows the more recently they have graduated, with a drop-off amongvery recent graduates.

Method:

Data on physicians’ usage of electronic reporting systems are located here: https://data.medicare.gov/data/physician-compare.

From the raw data, the following query produced a data set:

SELECT [Graduation year], 1.0*A/B AS [Proportion Participating] FROM ( SELECT [Graduation year] , count([Participating in PQRS]) AS A , COUNT([Graduation year]) AS B FROM [Challenge_PhysicianCompare].[dbo].[National_Downloadable_File_part$] GROUP BY [Graduation year] ) AS t WHERE [Graduation year] BETWEEN 1940 AND 2015

The plot was created in the following way:

library(ggplot2)
qplot(Year.Graduated, Proportion.Using.PQRS, data=mydata, 
      xlab='Graduation Year', ylab='Proportion of Physicians Participating in PQRS',
      main='PQRS Participation Increases with Graduation Year')