Consequences of Physician Report Cards
Posted by Clark Venable on 3/12/2005
The Medical Informatics Weblog: Consequences of Physician Report Cards:
"Reporting quality information publicly can promote quality improvement. However, according to an article in the current issue of the JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the value of publicly reporting quality information is essentially undemonstrated and may have unintended and negative consequences on health care. These unintended consequences include causing physicians to avoid sick patients in an attempt to improve their quality ranking, encouraging physicians to achieve “target rates” for health care interventions even when it may be inappropriate among some patients, and discounting patient preferences and clinical judgment."
This is a very timely JAMA article as the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council has just published its Guide to Coronary Bypass Graft Surgery 2003 in which it assigns higher than expected adjusted mortality mortality scores to three surgeons that I feel are head and shoulders above the rest in the list. In other words, it dinged the surgeons I think are the best. (as an aside, none practice an Pennsylvania any longer)
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