Grading doctors

It's the Information Age, and just as data exist that can help parents choose the school and even the teacher most likely to speed their child's academic progress, so do the data banks of the federal government contain information that could help patients locate a doctor with the most experience and the highest rate of success diagnosing or treating a given malady.

So it was good news when the government announced Monday that Medicare will finally allow its extensive claims database to be used by employers, insurance companies and consumer groups to produce report cards on local doctors and hospitals.

Doctors will be individually identifiable through the Medicare files, but personal data on patients will remain confidential.

"There is tremendous variation in how well doctors do, and most of us as patients don't know that. We make our choices blind," David Lansky, president of the Pacific Business Group on Health, explained to The Associated Press. "This is the beginning of a process to give us the information to make informed decisions."

Medicare acting administrator Marilyn Tavenner called the new policy "a giant step forward in making our health care system more transparent and promoting increased competition, accountability, quality and lower costs."

Consumers will see the first performance reports by late 2012, a Medicare spokesman promised. Companies will use the data analyses in their annual updates to their insurance plans. But Maria Ghazal, policy director at the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of major companies providing coverage to some 35 million people, said they also want to put report cards directly in the hands of their employees.

Not too surprisingly, though, some doctors and others worry that these statistics can be misinterpreted or misused.

The complaints are not entirely unfounded. Many a business or professional, in the era of the Internet, has felt the sting of one dissatisfied customer posting negative feedback that may be anything but measured or thoughtful.

When it comes to medical outcomes, the American Medical Association long argued such data could be misleading to untrained consumers. A surgeon whose patients develop lots of complications, for example, may actually be a top practitioner who takes cases that less-skilled competitors would turn away.

But secrecy and censorship are not the answer. Statistical data, purged of references that could identify individual patients, largely avoids focus on isolated outcomes. And the best answer to rumor and ignorance is generally accurate information, anyway -- lots of it.