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Dr. Frank Fortin (no relation) — Communications Director, MMS — responds to my flippant jibe at their recent lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts on their physician ranking program. He writes:
The MMS lawsuit is not against transparency. We are in favor of GOOD transparency. We also are deply involved in many statewide efforts to improve quality and control health care costs.
However, the system we have sued to correct is incredibly bad, and may actually make matters worse. It defames physicians and misleads patients. We tried to work with the state for years to correct its system, but after our repeated efforts fell on deaf ears, we had to go to court.
I don’t want to get too detailed about this, but here’s our key point: The methodology of this program is so bad, a great many doctors are assigned patients they didn’t treat, and assigned procedures they didn’t perform. Simple as that. Not a small fraction of doctors - a significant portion.
We’re not making perfection the enemy of the good. But the system we have sued to stop is not anywhere near good.
As an advocate of transparency, I think you would agree that a bad system is just noise. It does not advance the goals of using transparency to improve quality and control health costs.
The doctor makes several good points and rightly takes me to task as a spectator who only has a minimal grasp of the specific situation. And if we were to meet, say at a Fortin clan gathering in Massachusetts where I am from, I’m sure we would find a way to establish reasonable middle ground. My experience has taught me, however, that going to court on these matters adds more noise, more barriers to reasonable people coming to terms, more delays and costs, and in the end does not serve the public interest. It is an alternate universe that often results in a grossly distorted representation of the problems in health care.
But that’s just my opinion.
Now let’s get to the real issue. It’s a damn small world. And blogging makes it even smaller. How amazing is this! “Fortin” is not a common name at least in Hawaii. So maybe we are related in some distant French-Canadian sort of way. And if we eventually do disagree on these issues, let’s keep it in the family. ;>)
