Commentary

Pauline W. Chen, M.D., the Doctor and Patient columnist, has an excellent column on how to find a good doctor.

You should read this one. It is a quick education in how to search for a doctor. Dr. Chen developed this column after writing an earlier one which cautioned patients not to trust doctors too much.

There is no breaking news here. Her effort is efficiently organized and it helps readers see the connections between and among the kind of information-gathering they need to do to make their choices.

Bookmark this one.

New York Times

….”But many of the physicians also shared links to valuable Web sites, several of which I was unfamiliar with. All the sites are free to the public and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. When I looked at these sites while writing this column, I became really excited as a patient about the amount of information available. For example, one site from the Department of Health and Human Services called Hospital Compare (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov) allows you to select three hospitals within a 25-mile radius of your home. It also lets you compare a wide variety of quality indicators, like the percentage of heart failure patients who were given discharge instructions, the percentage of surgery patients given prophylactic antibiotics at the right time, or the percentage of hospitalized patients who felt that doctors or nurses “always” communicated well (the differences among hospitals surprised me).”

Source: New York Times, January 8, 2009