The American Medical Association has asked the nation's largest health insurance companies to help improve the accuracy, reliability and transparency of physician ratings.
New evidence suggests that patients are receiving inaccurate physician profiles from health insurers.
"Patients should always be able to trust that insurers are providing accurate and reliable information on physicians," said AMA President Cecil B. Wilson, MD. "Studies show that economic evaluations of individual physicians are so unreliable that they are more often wrong than right."
Letters co-signed by 47 state medical societies and sent by the AMA "called on each health insurer to publicly document the accuracy of their physician cost profiles by submitting the programs for external review by unbiased, qualified experts."
AMA officials say recent studies conducted by researchers at the RAND Corporation confirm longstanding contentions that serious flaws exist in health insurer programs that attempt to rate individual physicians based on economic criteria.
One study shows that physician ratings conducted by health insurers can be wrong up to two-thirds of the time for some groups of physicians, the AMA said. It suggests that even under the best circumstances, insurers misclassified one-fourth of all physicians.
This and other studies "call into question the use of cost-profiling tools to control healthcare spending and provide the public with information," the AMA said.
"Transparent, accurate information is critical when selecting a physician," said Wilson. "Patients deserve to know that insurers are offering physician ratings that have a high risk of error and should not be the sole basis for selecting a physician."
"Flawed physician profiling programs help no one and hurt many by causing confusion and apprehension among patients and eroding confidence and trust in caring physicians," he added. "Given the damage these error-filled reports can cause, insurers have an important public responsibility to reevaluate whether physician cost profiling is working as intended."