Evaluating Physicians

Houston Chronicle: Standard for rating doctors begins to take shape, 2008-Apr-1, by Lynn Cook:

The "Patient Charter" unveiled Tuesday is an outgrowth of the Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project, an initiative by a group of consumer, employer and labor organizations to improve publicly available health care industry performance information. Groups that have signed on include the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the AFL-CIO, AARP and the National Business Coalition on Health. Insurers participating include Cigna, Aetna, United Healthcare and Wellpoint, along with the health insurance industry's lobbying body, America's Health Insurance Plans. "The framework is nailed down. It's the details where it starts to get sticky," said Jonathan Osmundsen, a spokesman for the project. "Doctors, insurers, employers and patients all come at this from different perspectives, but they've agreed they have to generate fair rankings that are easily understood and actually useful." Among the charter's provisions, still subject to fine-tuning:

• Separation of care quality rankings from cost-efficiency measurements.
• Full disclosure by the insurance companies of what methods they use to rate doctors.
• Prior notice to physicians before they are ranked and a dispute process allowing them to challenge results they consider inaccurate.