Can we accurately classify physicians as high vs. low quality?
Medicare aims to tie 90% of reimbursement to quality measures. The potential for quality-linked reimbursement to incentivized improved quality of care, however, depends critically on whether physician quality can be measured reliably. Profiling individual physicians is difficult. Sample sizes are small and attributing patients to a single physician can be difficult (as Mehtrotra et al. 2010…