Last week, Medicare added patient satisfaction data to its hospital reporting website. This is progress, but it raises an interesting question: should patient satisfaction scores be case-mix adjusted?The motivation to include patient satisfaction data comes from the Institute of Medicine’s inclusion of “patient-centeredness” as one key component ...

Do you get as annoyed as I do about being pressured on your “Time of Discharge?” I just received my monthly report, and we’re in The Doghouse again: our average TOD – 3:28 pm – is hours after “check-out time.” But when did we turn into the Holiday Inn?Let’s start by appreciating where this comes from. Many hospitals, including mine, tend to run ...

Stuff this week that caught my eye: Does medical tourism harm the natives? Are all those CT scans destroying more than our budgets? Are nocturnalists at risk for more than decubs? Will Medicare need to cut hospital payments to fuel P4P? Answers: yes, yes, probably, and duh.Yesterday, NPR’s All Things Considered described the dark side of medical ...

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 ...

At my just-completed annual hospital medicine CME course, we held a fascinating session on the future of quality measurement, transparency, and pay for performance (P4P). The discussants – Andy Auerbach, Peter Lindenauer, and Kaveh Shojania – all emphasized the limits of process measurement, particularly noting the problems of unforeseen ...