Tip of the week: Define physician competency measures

When defining physician competency measures, make sure physicians are involved. Afterall, if physicians design the measures, they will be the first to know if they fail to meet them. The following seven criteria will help guide your selection and prioritization of indicators for your medical staff:

• Relevancy: Is it relevant to physician performance?
• Competency: Does it relate to an important expectation?
• Type: What type of indicator (i.e., rule, rate, or review indicators) would be most appropriate?
• Data source: Should the data come from clinical documentation, incident reports, or perception surveys?
• Attribution: Can it measure individual physician performance with reasonable reliability and accuracy, or is it effective only when measuring the performance of the medical staff or specialty as a group?
• Availability: How readily can the data be assessed?
• Benefit: Is the cost of the measure worth the improvement benefit?

This week's tip is adapted from Physician Competency: Using Data to Evaluate Performance, a Greeley Company seminar and part of the Credentialing Resource Center Symposium held in Las Vegas, NV. Learn more about the 2009 symposium by clicking here.