Mortality dropped with public reporting

Public reporting of patient outcomes by physician has been controversial. In theory, patients have better information to select a doctor. People from the medical community have countered that disclosure of outcomes will cause some providers to avoid accepting high-risk patients since those patients might skew their statistics. New York State endured this controversy when they decided to disclose outcomes for cardio-thoracic surgeons. UK also went through this question recently as well. The BMJ published a study showing that some of the stated fears of the medical community appear to be overblown.

More studies will come out, some probably in favor of public disclosure and some against. An interesting finding from this study is that mortality dropped. If true, opponents of public disclosure of outcomes will need to weigh that benefit against hypothetical risk-adverse patient selection (which this study did not seem to find). It's possible that there are particular details of the context of this study that might have made the patients less susceptible to doctors' avoidance of high-risk patients.