Nearly a half-million providers will see their Medicare payments docked this year because they failed to submit to Medicare data required by its Physician Quality Reporting System in 2013.

On the other hand, nearly 650,000 will receive a 0.5 percent raise because they did comply.

Lack of compliance may not be the issue it seems on the surface: of those who failed to submit the required quality data and face penalties of up to 1.5 percent of Medicare payments, 70 percent see fewer than 100 Medicare patients a year.

Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting System was introduced in 2007.   In 2013, providers were required to report on as many as 100 quality measures; this year, they are only being asked to provide data on nine such measures.

To learn more about provider compliance with Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting System, see this Wall Street Journal article.