The GAO has issued a report entitled “Quality Improvement Organizations’ Final Responses to Beneficiary Complaints.” By way of background, QIOs must review written quality-of-care complaints from Medicare beneficiaries and send to the beneficiary a final response summarizing their review findings. A practitioner involved in a case can decline to give consent for the QIO to identify him or her in its response; in such cases, the QIO’s final response contains less information. The GAO found while most QIO final responses it reviewed in detail complied with relevant requirements, almost half of the practitioners involved declined to provide consent for disclosure. According to the GAO, the requirement to obtain practitioner consent “remains a barrier to providing beneficiaries with more complete information about their complaints.” The GAO observed that QIOs could make the complaint process more transparent to beneficiaries, such as by providing information on corrective actions taken, which likely would “provide some assurance to beneficiaries that their complaints and any underlying problems identified were being addressed.”