Your Doctor’s Heart Surgery Success Rate
Residents of New York have been able to look up the patient mortality rates of specific cardiologists since 1991 which the State claims has improved patient care. Massachusetts now wants to do the same, but are the statistics reliable? Doctors claim that part of the decrease in death rates is due to the riskiest and sickest patients being referred out of state. Doctors also don’t want to release this information because it could lead to unwarranted discrimination and penalties.
Advocates of public reporting, however, believe open access to surgeons’ success and failure rates will:
- Improve the efficiency in the way billions of healthcare dollars are spent each year.
- Help patients decide where to seek treatment.
- Create market pressure on providers to improve care.
We’re supposed to check our doctors’ credentials especially when we need them for lifesaving operations, but I doubt that most people even know where they can access that information. If you’d like to do some checking up, Dr. Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch has a comprehensive list.
The Boston Globe, July 4, 2006
Technorati Tags: massachusetts, healthcare, health care, disease, health, cardiologists, surgeons, doctors, cardiovascular disease, cvd
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Hearty Healthcare
2 opinions for Your Doctor’s Heart Surgery Success Rate
A Hearty Life » US News and World Report Best American Hospitals 2006
Jul 7, 2006 at 6:50 am
[...] As I discussed earlier this week, this guide could be a nice supplement to other data on hospitals and doctors provided by the State. [...]
A Hearty Life » Doctors’ Track Records with Heart Defibrillators
Jul 10, 2006 at 5:11 pm
[...] As I mentioned last week, Massachusettes is currently deciding whether they should release detailed information on doctors’ records of performance when it comes to heart surgeries. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has decided NOT to release information on doctors’ track records with respect to heart-defibrillator implants. From aggregate data, The New York Times was able to determine that about 4 percent or 1800 of the 45,000 implants performed each year do result in at least one complication with the two most common being: [...]
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: