What happens when patients find out how good their doctors are? (2004)

Re:What happens when patients find out how good their doctor... by nradov on Monday December 04, 2017 @12:16PM (#15845494)

Nope that doesn't work because there's still no way to reliably control for the confounding factors. We don't even know what all the confounding factors are. Patients aren't randomly assigned to providers.

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Re:What happens when patients find out how good their doctor... by Retric on Monday December 04, 2017 @12:55PM (#15845887)

> Patients aren't randomly assigned to providers.

Sure, we don't have that information today. But, if we want to collect relevant information we could easily have a subset of doctors with random patient assignment. IMO, that's simply an implementation detail required if we want good information.

PS: US healthcare spending is over 3 trillion per year, rationally even minor improvements are worth large investments.

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Re:What happens when patients find out how good their doctor... by nradov on Monday December 04, 2017 @01:22PM (#15846148)

None of that is actually easy. Spend a few years working in a clinical environment and then tell us how easily it could be done.

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Re:What happens when patients find out how good their doctor... by Retric on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @12:51PM (#15853744)

I do work in healthcare for HHS this is very much the kind of thing we do. Change is hard, data collection is significantly easier.

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