Measurements of Physician Performance and Quality

Measurement of physician performance has received considerable attention in the U.S. healthcare debate. To determine whether practice caseloads are large enough to allow meaningful inferences on quality and cost, investigators used national databases to link 72,000 primary care physicians with 31,000 practices (61% were solo). The researchers then determined the Medicare caseload necessary to allow detection of a 10% difference from national averages in cost or frequency of the following clinical interventions in Medicare patients: mammography (age range, 66–69), glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA_1c) testing for patients with diabetes (age range, 66–75), preventable hospitalization rate for 13 different chronic care problems, and 30-day readmissi…