NEW YORK – Because quality measures intended to create patient-centered care are impractical, elitist, and ungrounded in the realities of most patients’ lives, physicians are forced to choose between being a failure, a bully, or both.
That’s according to Dr. Richard Young, director of research at the John S. Peters Health System in Fort Worth, Tex., and a speaker at the annual meeting of the North American Primary Care Research Group.
“The grand irony is that patient-centered care ... becomes a carrot-and-stick measurement system that incentivizes [doctors] to get what [they] want patients to do, not what the patients want,” Dr. Young said.
In a video interview, he also explains how borrowing “exception reporting” as practiced in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service would make the United States’ own quality measurement system more practical. Dr. Young also explains how physicians’ fear of missing quality measurement marks may lead them to avoid taking on the sickest and neediest of patients.
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