In a special section Decoding your health, the New York Times provides some solid information and advice to consumers in a variety of articles around topics like Googling your health, popular medical websites, FDA approval for medications, alternative medicine, and more.
One of the articles, You can find Dr. Right, with some effort, gives consumers some direction for selecting a physician, using what little objective data is currenty available, as most consumers continue to rely largely on word-of-mouth referrals from family and friends.
The article suggests contacting the usual suspects like your State Medical Board for licensing information, your health plan (as some are beginning to provide some quality measures) and the American Board of Medical Specialties for specialty certification information, as well as some of the emerging services offering physician ratings. Still, this is precious little information as the basis for a most intimate doctor/patient relationship--no quality measures of physician performance or even descriptive data about physicians' practices.
No surprises here, good objective data is hard to get, and volumes of subjective physician rating data will likely not provide the basis for good decision making. The relevance and timliness of our discussions around physician matching, performance measures of physians in practice, physician practice profiles, and data compilation and report out continues to be supported by the increasing public demand for quality measures for physicians.
"...patients cannot get their hands on a wealth of information about physicians that is compiled by government agencies.... The Medicare program recently started a physician quality reporting iniative,...information is not yet public."
In an attempt to obtain data about procedures done by physicians (e.g., knee replacements, prostate surgery, etc.), last year the nonprofit group Consumers' Checkbook won a lawsuit granting access to Medicare's physician records. The government is appealing the decision--there goes that big, publicly-available data set that we've been dreaming about.