The subjective is always where there is value. I wish there were surgeons that would accept these challenges and colleagues would objectively assign a degree of difficulty score. And a site that aggregated such scores. I really don’t care how “friendly” a doctor is - did the get the diagnosis right? Did they improve longevity? Did they improve quality of life? Not easy to score but what everyone wants to know.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s a legitimate request. I worked for a novel medical device company and we had a lot of surgeons on staff. While not a product we’d ever build, there was always discussion amongst the doctors of how to better grade physicians and specifically surgeons. The concern is was that a lot, and I mean a LOT, of surgeons were bad at their job. They were always proposing different syste…
He asks for a level of "objectivity" that you just can't get. What do you think medicine is? Like repairing toasters? "Why don't you simply assign some objective numbers" - it's so easy! No it is not, unless you only count a set of basic and routine procedures. Even things like a broken bone vary greatly - and then add the additional variance of the people having those broken bones.
You can sort of get some objectivity when you do statistics of lots and lots of patients in many places over long periods - but the problem OP wants is to be able to make statements about individuals (doctors). Being able to say something about a population is very different from saying something about an individual within the population. "Statistics" about a single doctor are and will be full of randomness.
Besides, if they did what I quoted from OPs statement above what would probably happen is that everybody declares everything as "very difficult" (or just below) expecting colleagues to do the same for them. In Germany private insurance has a multiplier on the amounts they can charge for something. Guess what: Everything is now declared as "very difficult" (with some short fuzzy explanation), multiplier 2.3. Almost nothing is charged at the "normal difficulty" rate.
> Did they improve longevity? Did they improve quality of life?
Given that each doctor is highly specialized, and that on the other hand your GP, the one who treats you long-term, can't actually do much when there is anything serious, those numbers are mostly out of the control of individual doctors. You would have to get such numbers system-wide, not per doctor. Medicine is supplied to patients throughout their life (incl. late life) by a network, not by an individual. There also is a huge impact of ones own life choices (e.g. obesity, smoking), and no, you can't just correct for them - not individually (for populations we can). All those numbers would look terrible for doctors who treat more of the worse cases. It would lead exactly to what the article is about.
I'm not arguing against trying to measure surgeon outcomes - I'm against trying to use those measures for things they are not good for.