Medicare Designates IPC The Hospitalist Company as a Qualified Registry for Physician Quality Data Submission

NORTH HOLLYWOOD, Calif., July 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IPC The Hospitalist Company, Inc. (Nasdaq: IPCM), a leading national hospitalist physician group practice company, announced today that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has approved the Company as a Qualified Registry for certain clinical measures specific to inpatient care in acute and sub-acute facilities. As a Qualified Registry, IPC will submit quality data directly to CMS in compliance with the Physicians Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), a quality assurance program established in 2006 by CMS, for the 2010 reporting year.

Adam Singer MD, Chairman and CEO of IPC, commented, "Clearly IPC has demonstrated to the satisfaction of CMS that we have fully integrated quality controls into the workflow of our providers and into the operations of the company. The driving force behind our commitment to building a complete and extensive quality control system is the constant improvement in the quality of care for our patients."  

"The CMS registry designation is the result of many months of extensive review and evaluation on the part of Medicare," said Kathy Loya, IPC's Chief Compliance Officer. "It is accorded only to those entities able to demonstrate that they have the systems, the management and the resources to capture, store, retrieve and deliver quality data with rigor and consistency."

The list of approximately 90 Qualified Registries for the 2010 reporting year was posted on the CMS site, www.cms.gov, on July 1, 2010. IPC is the only hospitalist company to receive the Qualified Registry designation.

About IPC The Hospitalist Company, Inc.

IPC The Hospitalist Company, Inc. (Nasdaq: IPCM) is a leading physician group practice company focused on the delivery of hospitalist medicine and related facility-based services. IPC's physicians and affiliated providers manage the care of patients in coordination with primary care physicians and specialists. The Company offers its providers the comprehensive training, information technology, and management support systems necessary to improve the quality and reduce the cost of patient care in the facilities it serves. For more information, visit the IPC website at www.hospitalist.com.

SOURCE IPC The Hospitalist Company, Inc.