Comments on: Do physician quality measures tell patients who’s a good doctor?

By: Evan Falchuk

Evan Falchuk — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:42:41 +0000

The problem with the plans for health care reform is that they are almost entirely focused on how health care is financed, not on how to help physicians and patients work better together. The administrative burdens alone of the new IT mandates will add new work to already over-stretched doctors offices. And we can also expect that reimbursements to doctors will continue to come under pressure, furthering existing problems with doctors having to see too many patients.

Doctors being paid to spend more time with their patients would probably do more to improve health care quality than any set of complicated performance metrics we can come up with.

Evan Falchuk

By: Tex Bryant

Tex Bryant — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:24:44 +0000

I believe that consumer rating sites of docs will have minimal impact on practices. The rewards for better practice come from efforts such as pay-for-performance, use of eprescribe, etc. These sources of revenue will drive physician behavior. Don’t believe me? Look how payers–Medicare, insurers, etc.–have affected the supply of primary care docs. So, as far as measuring care, I believe that population level data, such as the average of the A1c level of diabetic patients in a practice, will affect physician behavior more than consumer rating sites. In the near future, I believe that the greatest impact on physician behavior will be the new programs offered by the present administration and Congress’s in the Healthcare overhaul. I certainly hope that physicians and patients have a positive outcome from these programs.

By: amy

amy — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:00:19 +0000

Patient outcomes can not be used to determine whether a doctor is good or bad. Each case is too individual to label. What about the Dr’s who specialize in treating very complex cases, will they be downgraded because they are willing to accept and treat tough cases? What measures are used to determine that this is a good outcome? What if the outcome is as good as possible but the patient still isn’t satisfied or didn’t like the Dr? How much is this data crunching going to cost and who will pay for it? Will patients be educated enough to read all that goes into this data adn read between the lines?

By: Jeff Brandt

Jeff Brandt — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:53:25 +0000

I personally try to get references from friends ( I have a lot of doctor friends) when possible. I used Yelp once to find a dentist and that worked out well. The biggest problem that I see with social media reviews is that you must look at the reviewer and scrutinize their qualifications. App reviews are one of the worst. People review more on what the app does not do instead of what it does and do not take pricing into account for the features provided.

I see doctor getting unfair ratings downgrades for not spending enough time with a patient. Doctors basically work by the hour, if they have an extended visit they must charge additional time. People except this if the worker is a plumber but not a doctor.

I think that the rating system must be from some sort of standardized metrics.

Jeff Brandt motionPHR Personal Heath Record for the iPhone
MyMedBox – PHR lite for Android