“When the statistics were publicized, some talented surgeons with higher-than-expected mortality statistics lost their operating privileges, while others, whose risk aversion had earned them lower-than-predicted rates, used the report cards to promote their services in advertisements.”<\/p>\n
Gathering and analyzing the statistics is nonetheless a good idea. Refining the comparison cohorts would be an improvement, but the first thing I’d do would be to reduce the visibility. If the only person who saw a particular doctor’s numbers was that doctor, he or she could decide whether variance was due to exogenous factors or a signal to take steps to improve. The direct link to an incentive (operating privileges) is, as usual, a driver of dysfunction.<\/p>\n
What would you do?<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/07\/22\/opinion\/giving-doctors-grades.html<\/p>\n
(Shout-out to Garth Shoemaker<\/a> for bringing this article to The Mole’s attention.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “When the statistics were publicized, some talented surgeons with higher-than-expected mortality statistics lost their operating privileges, while others, whose risk aversion had earned them lower-than-predicted rates, used the report cards to promote their services in advertisements.” Gathering and analyzing the statistics is nonetheless a good idea. Refining the comparison cohorts would be an improvement, but… Continue reading Doctoring the numbers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-perils-of-metrics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}