Douglas S. Brown, general counsel at Worcester’s UMass Memorial Medical Center, lauds public reporting as the prime reason why their cardiac surgery program made such a dramatic turnaround in terms of patient mortality.
Maybe so, but I can’t help but to wonder if some of the reason is the unspoken or unconscious pressure on the surgeons not to accept complicated, or high-risk patients who can drive up mortality rates.
That’s something that can’t be measured or surveyed, so it’s impossible to know if public reporting was singularly responsible for the improved outcomes.
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