Quality variance among healthcare professionals

Sometimes, professional medical organizations will declare that anyone who has fulfilled the necessary steps to secure a medical degree (and perhaps obtained certification) is adequately competent to treat patients. Yet, providers can vary in their judgements and skills, sometimes leading to very different patient health outcomes. KFF Health News published a piece that opens with a patient who received very different treatments from different providers. One provider apparently said that the patient should not be expected to recover from a heart attack, while another successfully treated the same patient, giving him enough time for a heart transplant. More generally, the article is about the inadequacies of one health system (where the first provider worked), which could become complacent after it formed from a merger, because it became the sole health system in a large area.

Part of the challenge is that while some people are privy to the internal benchmarks, quality reports are not made publicly available. The CEO of the health system has strong relationships with state and local officials, who support the health system and may be suppressing quality issues. Essentially, both the health system and some government officials ask for the trust of the public that the health system is performing adequately. Meanwhile, people who are familiar with healthcare quality have raised concerns, echoing concerns from local medical professionals. Cases like this illustrate why releasing quality reports to the general public can be helpful to individuals who, as described in the article, might actually move out of the area for better health care.