On Physician Referrals
As clinicians, we generate incredible amounts of data on a daily basis. If you think about the number of orders generated per patient interaction on admission through follow-up care all the way through discharge, we are essentially a data generating fools.
Further to this, consider the sheer volume of data created from the very transactional nature of medicine. Take for instance something as benign as physician referrals. Emergency room physician A refers to General practitioner B for follow-up care of the patient that he or she has seen in the emergency room. Alternatively general practitioner C refers then refers to specialist D for the same and vice versa. In many ways referrals are part of the institutional glue that holds modern healthcare together in addition to being a substantial driver of wealth. From a data analytics standpoint, referrals provide an interesting opportunity. By finding out which physicians other physicians refer to most frequently, one obtains a sense of which physicians are the most trusted amongst physician networks and groups. This may also indirectly reflect such qualities as approachability, affability, ability, responsiveness and overall professionalism.
Sarah Mirtoff highlights this issue in a wonderful piece from Wired magazine, detailing the rise of companies that seek to explore the significance of this type of data. The beautiful image that accompanies this post was provided by the company Healthtap, and is a snapshot of northern California doctors and the referrals to other doctors. Each doctor is represented by a blue dot and the connecting lines represent a referral.
Furthermore, data scientists like Fred Trotter that inhabit the healthcare IT space, are busy working away at making this whole process of physician referrals more transparent and truthfully, democratizing data. Recently, Fred took to the health IT start up crowd-funding platform MedStartr and was able to raise $15,000 towards building out this database. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and I believe that this is a positive step in the right direction. To be fair, however, I would also hope to see this kind of transparency in other industries also. For instance, why are there are no open graphs of business to business referrals in say the food industry, the fashion industry, and manufacturing industries also? Knowing how interconnected certain companies and brands are might better inform my choices as a consumer.