What's below is the result of a challenge: can a company that helps patients find the right doctor identify the best physicians over all, or at least come close? (You can also go here for a list of top breast oncologists.)
Last year, I wrote a magazine profile of a company called Grand Rounds, which aims to meticulously comb through data on physicians – everything from what they prescribe to the wait times in their parking lots — to help pick the right doctor for the right patient. The company’s founder, Owen Tripp, even used the service himself when a type of tumor was found in his ear. “It's not that there aren't good doctors, and it's certainly not that there aren't enough of them,” Tripp said last week at the Forbes Healthcare Summit. The problem is measurement.
OK, smart guy, I said. If you can tell which doctors are better, give me a list of the best. Grand Rounds uses a computer model based on publicly available and proprietary data, including administrative claims data from insurers, practice affiliations, board certifications, disciplinary actions, and academic publications. These data don’t tell how a doctor’s patients do, but they do allow the company to look at how doctors were trained, who they work with, what they prescribe, and procedures they perform. For instance, in breast cancer oncology, better physicians are more likely to perform genomic tests. In contrast, in cardiology, ordering more tests is a sign of lower physician quality. The lists we’re publishing today, in breast cancer oncology and cardiology, are the result of using a machine learning algorithm on many such measures.
There are limitations to this analysis. Grand Rounds says it misses excellent doctors who belong on it. Efforts to find outside experts who could vet Grand Rounds’ algorithms were unsuccessful. Like many efforts in machine learning or artificial intelligence, the results emerge from a black box that’s hard for outsiders to evaluate. And Grand Rounds is a private company, with the skepticism it entails. But this list, and the other, are at the least thought-provoking. And I can confirm, based on years of reporting, that many of the physicians included are indeed the best in their fields.
Honor Roll
| Antonio Abbate | Virginia Commonwealth University |
| Theodore Abraham | UCSF |
| Ezra Amsterdam | UC Davis |
| Richard Becker | University of Cincinnati |
| Roger Blumenthal | Johns Hopkins |
| Wendy Book | Emory University |
| Barry Borlaug | Mayo Clinic |
| Mario Deng | UCLA |
| Stavros Drakos | University of Utah |
| Howard Eisen | Drexel University |
| Michael Fowler | Stanford Medicine |
| Valentin Fuster | Mount Sinai |
| Ray Hershberger | The Ohio State University |
| James Kirkpatrick | UW Medical Center |
| Itzhak Kronzon | Northwell Health |
| Amir Lerman | Mayo Clinic |
| Stephen Little | Houston Methodist |
| Donald Lloyd-Jones | Northwestern |
| Douglas Mann | Washington University in St. Louis |
| Mathew Maurer | New York-Presbyterian |
| Jawahar Mehta | University of Arkansas |
| Steven Nissen | Cleveland Clinic |
| Eric Peterson | Duke Clinical Research Institute |
| Douglas Sawyer | Maine Medical Center |
| Randall Starling | Cleveland Clinic |
| Heinrich Taegtmeyer | University of Texas |
| David Taylor | Cleveland Clinic |
Sarah Hedgecock and Ellie Kincaid contributed to this story.
