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posted by janrinok on Thursday July 23 2015, @08:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the that-wasn't-the-plan dept.

Beginning in the early 1990s a quality-improvement program began in New York State and has since spread to many other states where report cards were issued to improve cardiac surgery by tracking surgical outcomes, sharing the results with hospitals and the public, and when necessary, placing surgeons or surgical programs on probation. But Sandeep Jauhar writes in the NYT that the report cards have backfired. "They often penalized surgeons, like the senior surgeon at my hospital, who were aggressive about treating very sick patients and thus incurred higher mortality rates," says Jauhar. "When the statistics were publicized, some talented surgeons with higher-than-expected mortality statistics lost their operating privileges, while others, whose risk aversion had earned them lower-than-predicted rates, used the report cards to promote their services in advertisements."

Surveys of cardiac surgeons in The New England Journal of Medicine have confirmed that reports like the Consumer Guide to Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery have limited credibility among cardiovascular specialists, little influence on referral recommendations and may introduce a barrier to care for severely ill patients. According to Jauhar, there is little evidence that the public — as opposed to state agencies and hospitals — pays much attention to surgical report cards anyway. A recent survey found that only 6 percent of patients used such information in making medical decisions. "Surgical report cards are a classic example of how a well-meaning program in medicine can have unintended consequences," concludes Jauhar. "It would appear that doctors, not patients, are the ones focused on doctors' grades — and their focus is distorted and blurry at best."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @09:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @09:13PM (#212853)

    Surgeons would prefer IQ:

    Occupation: IQ
    1. Surgeon: 234.1

    http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/01/average-iq-by-occupation-estimated-from.html [blogspot.com]

  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday July 24 2015, @10:20AM

    by Wootery (2341) on Friday July 24 2015, @10:20AM (#213095)

    It seems unlikely that the average IQ of a surgeon is the world-record [mostextreme.org] IQ. [quora.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @04:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @04:16PM (#213198)

    After reading multiple comments critiquing the post for the same thing, it's clear that I did a poor job of explaining what the table purports to show. It's not supposed to be an exact measure of IQ by profession by any means, as it is based entirely on average annual income figures. In other words, it's an income table with the values converted to IQ scores (and thus, as silly girl points out, it's a bit of a mislabeling on my part, although that is the point--to get an instinctive feel for how related IQ and income are at the career level).

    And this is why IQ should be treated as nothing but a joke. We have yet to even truly define intelligence, and yet simplistic thinking leads people to arbitrarily conclude that money and grades indicate how intelligent you are. I see no hard evidence for any of this; people often simply assume that those things indicate your intelligence, with no proof to back it up.

    "People who do well at our arbitrary and simplistic tests tend to also do well at these other things." would be a bit more honest, but most people (especially normal people) don't seem to get that.