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Leadership responsibility: Acting on competency data

Hospitalist Leadership Connection, November 28, 2007

As hospitalists take on medical staff leadership roles and get involved in monitoring physician competency data, they are increasingly faced with determining when to hold physicians accountable for performance. Many organizations send out the first physician competency reports and immediately want to take action on data that is below expectations. However, it is unfair to do so for two reasons:

• The data may not be entirely accurate, and distributing it to the physicians first is a good way to determine whether that is the case
• If you want to have a culture of improvement, you must give people time to improve

A one- to two-year grace period, in which reports are distributed but not actions are taken, allows physicians time to understand the data and, if it is not at an acceptable or excellent performance level, to determine why.

Learn more about collecting and monitoring physician competency data inside Measuring Physician Competency: How to Collect, Assess, and Provide Performance Data by Robert Marder, MD, Mark Smith, MD, Marla Smith, MHSA, and Vicki Searcy, CPMSM, published by HCPro, Inc.

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