How to create valid physician profiles

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.