Doctors resist push to publish individual quality data

Payers and the government are pushing hard to make physician-specific performance data available to the public, and many doctors don't like it a bit. According to a Commonwealth Fund study, 69% of physicians in a national survey were opposed to sharing physician-specific performance data with the general public. Forty-four percent expressed hesitancy at sharing individual performance data with their own patients, and 27% were hesitant to share it with medical leadership. The study was published in the May/June Health Affairs. One reason for the opposition may be that physicians don't want a limited data set to be used as the sole measure of their work, said Stephen Schoenbaum, co-author of the study and an executive vice president at the Commonwealth Fund. "I think there is a real disassociation between what makes sense at the patient's perspective and where the docs have put their feet down," Schoenbaum said. -- by Joseph Conn