Great doctors can have worse mortality rates than average because they tackle the most marginal / difficult cases. It would not be wise to compare mortality ra

Great doctors can have worse mortality rates than average because they tackle the most marginal / difficult cases. It would not be wise to compare mortality rates between dentists and heart surgeons and conclude that dentists are the better practitioners and should be doing the heart surgery. With that said, the article is intriguing. They followed 30 day mortality, which might not quite be a long enough timeframe. This metric penalises surgery which might be trading a higher "up front" risk for many more years of better quality life and rewards treating a patient who is more likely to die without surgery in the next 30 days. The conclusion of the article could still be true but it seems one of those findings that (as usual) warrants further investigation. If you have ever been the victim of a metric that can lead to perverse outcomes like "LoC per day" or "tickets closed per week" then I think you can appreciate.