Court Orders Medicare to Release Doctor Data for Ratings - WSJ

As doctors, regulators and insurers bicker over physician ratings, a court ruling promises to crack open a mother lode of data on specific practitioners.

Consumers’ Checkbook – a Washington, D.C., group that rates everything from plumbers to health clubs — asked Medicare last year to provide detailed claims data from four states and D.C., including which physicians provided care. (Another, pending request covers all 50 states.) Medicare balked and the matter landed in federal court in D.C.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan told the Department of Health and Human Services to cough up the data by Sept. 21. Disclosure is in the public interest, he said, particularly as it helps the public keep tabs on how well Medicare does its job.

Consumers’ Checkbook, which already rates doctors by asking them to recommend their peers, says it initially plans to use the data to show how often a given physician has performed various procedures. “We know that for many types of procedures, experience matters,” Robert Krughoff, the group’s president, told the Health Blog from Colombia, where he is on a family vacation.

Later, he expects the group will look at how well doctors follow treatment guidelines. (Read the group’s press release and the court’s opinion for more.)