Every U.S. city has a local magazine that runs an annual doctor beauty pageant known as Top Doctors. You'd be amazed how much energy goes into this. Big hospitals engineer ballot-stuffing projects. Doctors scheme how to get noticed as a top doc. So, what's wrong with this? Well, it embodies what's wrong with U.S. healthcare. At a time when society is racing to ascribe value to everything based on fact-based objective performance and customer perspective, Top Docs is based on nothing. Here's the Top Doc nominating application
Here's what we find interesting:
Only healthcare professionals vote for each other.
And top docs is based on one question: "If you're loved one needed care, what doctor would you call?"
No patients vote
No performance data is used
This is the basis for rating and honoring the top heart surgeon? Holy cow.