GAO Finds Physician Profiling Can Work

Individual services provided to a patient by a particular physician accounted for only 2% of total expenditures—about $350 for each Medicare patient in a physician’s practice, GAO said. All other services—including those provided by other physicians, home health care, hospice care, outpatient services, and durable medical equipment—accounted for the remaining 44% of expenditures.

Profiling physicians to improve efficiency has been used by some private insurance companies. Overall, GAO said a per capita methodology is "a useful approach" to profiling physicians on their practice efficiency and could become part of a feedback program that includes quality measures and episode based resource-use measures.