The proportion of medicare physicians who self-report on the quality of their care to the PQRS system is boosted by physicians’ participation in the Million Hearts project to reduce incidences of heart disease. The boost is independent of Graduation Year.

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], [Participated in Million Hearts], 1.0*A/B AS [Proportion Participating] FROM ( SELECT [Graduation year] , [Participated in Million Hearts] = CASE WHEN [Participated in Million Hearts] = ‘Y’ THEN ‘Y’ ELSE ‘N’ END , COUNT([Participating in PQRS]) AS A , COUNT([Graduation year]) AS B FROM [Challenge_PhysicianCompare].[dbo].[National_Downloadable_File_part$] GROUP BY [Graduation year], [Participated in Million Hearts]) AS t WHERE [Graduation year] BETWEEN 1940 AND 2015

The plot was created in the following way:

library(ggplot2)
qplot(x=Graduation.year, y=Proportion.Participating, 
      color = Participated.in.Million.Hearts, data=mydata, 
      xlab='Graduation Year', ylab='Proportion of Physicians Participating in PQRS',  
      main='Million Hearts Participation Boosts PQRS Participation')