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> Creating a way to compare doctors' performance would be a big undertaking requiring some kind of unified, centralized push for standardization -- almost certa
by jquery 16y ago
> Creating a way to compare doctors' performance would be a big undertaking requiring some kind of unified, centralized push for standardization -- almost certainly by the government.
I find this a dubious claim. We have entire thriving industries of third parties who evaluate complex products and services. I don't see how medicine is any different in that respect, from, say, finance or engineering.
- carbocation 16y agoThings that would make those quantifiers very rich: (1) Objectively assessing the severity of illness, regardless of what illness (or constellation thereof) the patient had. (2) Objectively assessing the degree to which a physician's intervention improved an outcome, and the distance between the true outcome and the best outcome (and the null / no treatment outcome). I think that those two make medicine qualitatively more difficult to quantify in a useful fashion. (Though there are lots of useless ways to quantify medical interventions and physicians.) If you think you have some good ideas for solving those two problems, you have the chance to become very rich; please contact me if so (seriously).
- jquery 16y agoI appreciate your elaboration... it really has me stumped. I understand the extreme difficulty of objective evaluations of individual performance in highly technical professional fields. But to the extent this problem is intractable, I'm not sure how adding government makes it tractable. Maybe I'm coming at it from the wrong angle?