How long until transparency?

The New York Times published today a report on CMS' slow release of complication data related to heart difibrillator devices.

To read the article -click here

The surpirising part was not the actual complication rate (roughly 4% in the study - whereas a recent report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology showed a 10.8%) but that CMS was still not willing to release the doctors and hospitals with the higher complication rates.

Granted, there are always two sides to the story. Those hospitals and physicians that do "more complicated" procedures may have higher complications - but those same physicians - statistically - often do more procedures - hypothetically making them better at the procedure and achieving a more normal bell curve that represents the population at large

To me, however, the issue is simple. Would I want to know whether or not my mother's physician had done a procedure before...and whether or not the physician had a history of complications when performing the procedure?

Of course...unfortunately we still won't be empowering patients and rewarding those who do a good job any time soon.