Video Transcript: Resistance to Measurement

Paul Batalden, MD, Professor, Dartmouth Medical School

I remember the first time that I tried to work on this was just after the Medicare program made available the performance data for physicians. This was in the '70s. The organizations were the PSRO, or professional standards review organizations. I was a community volunteer and the assumption was that if you gave physicians their own performance data, that they would be grateful and change. I was a volunteer and my job was to call on the statistical outliers. And so what happened was I would try to open the conversation, but whatever words I used effectively meant 'hello dumby.' So one of the big challenges was the second line. I mean, what do you say after 'hello dumby'? So that didn't go very well.