The lede:

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is pouring $15.9 million into a new effort to give doctors and the public a more accurate assessment of physician performance.

The plan is to combine national Medicare and private health plan claims data and then use the data for public reporting of physician performance on quality and cost measures. Reporting in select areas is set for 2010.

The initiative comes on top of criticism that the nation’s dozens of quality measurement and reporting efforts are redundant or rely on widely varying metrics. For example, a 2005 Institute of Medicine report on performance measurement called for a new office in Health and Human Services to coordinate and fund the development of metrics for pay-for-performance and public reporting programs.

The whole shebang.