Idiots Following Idiots
Quality metrics are unproven. They are a moving target. They are what’s wrong with medicine yet “physician groups are increasingly incorporating quality metrics into their internal reimbursement structure, according to an article published Nov. 25 in Medical Economics.” Incredible. It turns out that primary care physicians generated 3 percent of their total compensation last year based on quality measures (patient satisfaction, quality of care, and cost containment), while performance-based data were tied to 2 percent of total compensation for specialists. This will only get worse. My New Year’s wish is that PCPs grow some balls and fight back against this crap. They will but not for another five years when it is too late.
Of course, the administrators will never let their salaries be contingent upon their physician satisfaction scores
This is a lost battle since the administrators for which doctors now work for (our bosses) have entirely sold themselves into this crap.
The system is totally flawed from the standpoint that the standards for surveys are based on percentiles. Meaning that by definition there will ALWAYS be a 79% hospitals below the 80th percentile. Duh!
In one facility I work, patients are asked to rate the ED from 1 (worse), to 10 (best). But they are not told that only 9 and 10 are considered a “passing score”. What a fricken joke. It seems that the government has completely rigged the system in order not to reimburse retained payments.
Happy 2014…
We hospitalists have the same numbers racket to deal with. Presently I have a part-time job reviewing charts for a hospital chain–NOT for quality or anything related to it, but to help decide if patients should be inpatient or observation. The most common question from the beleaguered nurses is “Patient does not meet InterQual criteria for inpatient care–do you agree?” The govt. standards for how much care you have to need are so unreliable that the hospital saves big bucks by having actual DOCTORS decide if the patients need inpatient care. Of course, we still have to listen to flak from non-physicians about “length of stay” this and “patient satisfaction” that…