We’ve already written about why it’s important to track individual surgeon performance.
But here’s what Ashish Jha, MD, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, said about the critical importance of surgeon-level quality data in the medical journal, JAMA last year.
Dr. Jha’s editorial is aimed squarely at the skeptics. With careful attention to research, he dismantles common objections to reporting surgeon outcomes — most of which come from the surgeons themselves. These skeptical surgeons favor facility-level quality data. However, the evidence suggests that this broader measure doesn’t give patients the information they need. As Dr. Jha put it: “picking the right surgeon is at least as important as picking the right hospital.”
Here are four reasons why. Read more »