If I were to publish my ratings, one doctor will be unfairly penalized. However, hundreds of patients will benefit by being able to switch to a better doctor. In this hypothetical situation, do the rights of one doctor outweigh the rights of so many patients?
We also have record levels of advertising by not only drugmakers but also doctors and hospitals. If there is a shortage of providers, why is so much being spent on demand generation efforts?
If twice as many people who are going to one doctor or hospital are ending up dead or crippled, and there are no discernible confounding factors (age, socioeconomic, co-morbidities, etc), then I want to know. One might even say the patient has a right to know. The burden should be on the provider/facility to convince the patient to trust them nonetheless.
If we go with your proposal then the inevitable outcome is that the best providers (particularly surgeons) will engage in metrics arbitrage by refusing to treat patients whose co-morbidities and complications aren't adequately captured by standardized coding systems and clinical guidelines. Is that really the outcome you want?
As for putting the burden on providers to convince patients to trust them, good luck with that. We currently have shortages of providers in many areas and specialties due to price fixing and supply constraints. So most patients have to take what they can get regardless of trust.
Based on the doctors I know, the medical world does not have an especially profound understanding of how to deal with large amounts of data. Their specialities are diagnosis or specialist surgery, not data.
If the data is so scary we have to hide it then there are glaring problems that need to be addressed. Sure there are misleading edge cases; but believing that accurate data will be worse than word of mouth is, quite frankly, unwarrented.
If a provider's or facility's (or entire speciality's) numbers look bad, that's important information for the consumer to possess. Hiding the numbers should not be an option.
Or do you think that car crash test results, and airplane crash data, and health department inspection findings should also be kept secret?
More problematically, if you can't articulate a quantifiable standard that will indicate a provider's quality level, then then entire concept seems ill-defined. I.e., when you refer to the "best providers", what does that even mean?
Their statement only seem bizarre when you view it from the perspective of individualism. Another way to look at it is - let me (ab)use Star Trek quote: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". You seem to make absolute statements that in fact are relative and rooted in one ideology you chose to follow.
> If a provider's or facility's (or entire speciality's) numbers look bad, that's important information for the consumer to possess. Hiding the numbers should not be an option.
Forgive me the harshness - I believe this is a simplistic way of looking at the problem. OP clearly showed systemic forces at play, and those are important to consider. You're saying "hiding the numbers", as if they were perfect numbers hidden away in a safe. Problem is there are not, and even when they might be very nuanced. A point raised by OP: "best providers (particularly surgeons) will engage in metrics arbitrage by refusing to treat patients" - I think it is a perfectly reasonable threat, which you chose to ignore.
> Or do you think that car crash test results, and airplane crash data, and health department inspection findings should also be kept secret?
Again going back to OP's example - doctor's might be incentivised not to treat patients which make their numbers look bad. None of your examples share similarity in this sense (and possibly in many more).
If your concern is with metrics arbitrage, then it is not necessary to use quantitative metrics to satisfy concerns about bodily autonomy. One might instead require providers to furnish anonymized records of all the adverse events their patients have experienced, along with any mitigating factors they think absolve them of responsibility.
I think the issue of quantification is actually a red herring. A simpler example will indicate whether or not there are differences in our ethical intuition. I am scheduled for a "routine" surgery, but yesterday's patient who was having the same surgery by the same doctor had a major artery sliced, bled out and died. All the staff are aware of what happened, but no one tells me. In fact, even if I ask, people are instructed to say nothing. If I possessed this information, I would almost certainly decide not to proceed. I go ahead with the procedure based on the understanding that death is a much more remote possibility than those treating me happen to believe. Is this or is this not a violation of my bodily autonomy?
If it puts out of business doctors and facilities (perhaps even specialties?) whose patients agree to care based on grossly inaccurate understandings of their track record, then it would more than pay for itself.
You have hit upon the core problem though. Outside of a few limited areas where we have clear evidence-based medicine guidelines there is no reliable quantifiable standard for measuring provider quality.