Therapeutic Choice and Outcomes at the Physician Level

Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Healthcare Policy, Harvard Medical School, presented research on how therapeutic choice and patient outcomes vary at the physician level. Dr. Jena said that improving US healthcare will rely on better measuring and learning how to shape physician behavior. Throughout this segment, Dr. Jena presents a study that aimed to determine what makes sense for a physician-based measure of performance in diabetes care. He said that the goal was to:

1. To propose a measure to study physician level performance in diabetes care.
2. To study how the measure varied across physicians.
3. To identify high and low performing physicians and see how they differ.
4. How many adverse complications related to diabetes be avoided.