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Patients may Not Find High-quality Care Via Available Physician Characteristics
"To improve the quality of care received by their beneficiaries, some health plans use physician report cards and tiered physician networks to steer their members toward physicians who provide high-quality care. However, most patients do not have access to physician quality measures," the authors write as background information in the article. "Patients are therefore encouraged to use publicly available proxies for clinical performance when choosing a physician. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality advises patients to consult state medical boards and to seek information on board certification and training as a way to assess the quality of care physicians provide."
Rachel O. Reid, B.A., of the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues used claims data from 1.13 million adults from 2004 to 2005 to calculate overall performance scores on 124 quality measures for each of 10,408 Massachusetts physicians. They then obtained information about the same physicians from the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine.
The average overall performance score for the physicians was 62.5 percent. Of the publicly available individual physician characteristics, three were associated with higher overall performance: female sex, board certification and graduation from a domestic medical school. However, the differences were small in magnitude. There was no significant association between malpractice claims and performance.
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