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One problem is that medicine is very counter-intuitive in terms of evaluating practitioners. Metrics that consumers think they would want to look at are very de
by fluidcruft 11y ago
One problem is that medicine is very counter-intuitive in terms of evaluating practitioners. Metrics that consumers think they would want to look at are very deceiving once you start digging into what's really going on. The reality is that often the best doctors work on extremely challenging cases that have both high costs and poor outcomes. Some doctors build practices that filter to select the easy cases (i.e. those with a large mismatch between allowed charges and actual resource needs). This allows them to push discounts do their patients aggressively because of the overall pool of cases they've selected. I haven't seen of any reasonable way of handicapping metrics that actually works, and frankly I would be extremely wary of anyone that claimed to have the answer. Honestly, I have no idea how you go about evaluating this situation as a consumer.
- dredmorbius 11y agoThere are some attempts to do severity adjustment, though these typically rely on diagnosis codes, which can themselves be gamed. A fairly strong heuristic is simply experience: the number of procedures performed is highly correlated with quality. Facilities often have strongly uniform outcomes determined by senior staff.