Rating physicians is a complex and imperfect science, if one can call it that.  In my experience some of he finest doctors were those that talked to patients more and operated less – how do you rate that skill or give it a numeric score?  We have a long way to go before any of these tools will be truly useful . . . obi jo

Physicians, AMA triumph in privacy court case
Physicians—and the AMA—won a major victory last week when a federal appeals court rejected a consumer group’s attempt to use Medicare billing records to rate doctors.
In Consumers’ Checkbook v. United States, the nonprofit Consumers’ Checkbook group won a lower-court ruling in 2007 that directed the government to release Medicare physician payment records under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The AMA urged the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to challenge the decision, and the Litigation Center of the AMA and State Medical Societies joined the HHS in an appeal. The AMA argued that the use of raw Medicare claims data would not only have almost no bearing on the quality of medical services but would tend to mislead patients.
In a judgment issued Jan. 30, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the AMA and the HHS. In its decision, the court noted the significant right to privacy physicians have and concluded that the release of personal physician payment data does not meet the standard of the Freedom of Information Act.
“Every physician who works with Medicare will benefit from the AMA’s legal victory to preserve physicians’ privacy,” AMA Trustee Jeremy Lazarus, MD, said. “Transparency is important for both patients and physicians, and the AMA supports sharing appropriate quality data to help with health care decision-making. The release of raw data that shows nothing more than how many times a physician performs a procedure—as opposed to how well the procedure is done—can potentially harm an existing patient-physician relationship and may in fact lead to poor health care decisions.”