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.�