Q&A: It’s all about the patients (except when it isn’t)

Physicians and hospitals are being evaluated on myriad quality metrics, with results increasingly tied to financial penalties or bonuses. But payers, providers, and patients don’t always agree on what “quality” means, and there is no official set of standards. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Scott Wallace, a visiting professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine; Thomas Guastavino, a retired orthopedic surgeon from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Margaret O’Kane, founder and president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), discussed the current state of healthcare metrics.

Source: The Wall Street Journal