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Evaluating Medical Training Programs by the Quality of Care Delivered by Their Alumni
David A. Asch, MD;
Andrew Epstein, PhD, MPP;
Sean Nicholson, PhD
JAMA. 2007;298:1049-1051.
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Medical education serves many goals, and all of them are difficult to measure. For that reason, assertions that one medical school or residency program is better than another may have many different meanings. Nevertheless, most stakeholders, including prospective trainees, health systems, and patients, could be justified in expecting that graduates of good training programs generally take care of patients well, and that graduates of better training programs generally take care of patients better. The evaluation of medical education programs ought to keep this goal in sight.
Because patient outcomes are already used to judge the performance of physicians and hospitals, a logical extension might be to evaluate training programs in part by the downstream outcomes of patients treated by their graduates. A key issue is whether patients have better outcomes if they receive care from physicians trained at top . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Author Affiliations: Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Dr Asch); Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (Drs Asch and Nicholson); Division of Health Policy and Administration, School of Public Health, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (Dr Epstein); and Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massaschusetts (Dr Nicholson).
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