title: How to create valid physician profiles.
abstract: The simplest way to profile physicians' hospital practices is to rank them by their patients' length of stay and hospital charges, asserts guest columnist Patrice Spath, RHIT, a health care consultant with Brown-Spath Associates. The assumption is that those physicians whose patients have a higher length of stay and/or charges are the physicians who have high complication rates, provide less-than-adequate patient care, or are not practicing cost-effective care.
authors.affiliation: Brown-Spath Associates, Forest Grove, OR, USA.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Spath
mesh_terms: D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D008505:Medical Staff, Hospital / Q000145:classification*; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians'; D020379:Risk Adjustment; D014481:United States