Today my pals Peter Lindenauer and Andy Auerbach (and colleagues) published the largest hospitalist outcomes study to date, in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a rigorous, important piece of work. Let me try to add a bit of context.First, the What’s What. Using the massive database of the Premier system (which Peter has mined to ...

So Zagat will now be rating doctors, using the methods it perfected helping you find the best sushi in Brooklyn Heights. What’s next, Consumer Reports rating grad schools? Fodor rating auto mechanics?Whatever you think of Zagat’s cross-dressing, it again demonstrates the bottomless market for doctor rankings. HealthGrades, the Colorado company ...

The comments to my original post on this topic are so striking and passionate that I wanted to answer them in a new post rather than as another comment. First, ''LPrieto'' wrote, ''I think the death of outpatient general Internal Medicine is inevitable.''  Then ''C33333'' wrote that 16/17 of his or her (hard to sort out the gender of people ...