This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Medical Practice  • Medical Education  • Quality of Care  • Quality of Care, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

David A. Asch, MD; Andrew Epstein, PhD, MPP; Sean Nicholson, PhD

JAMA. 2007;298(9):1049-1051.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

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).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Evaluating Obstetrical Residency Programs Using Patient Outcomes
Asch et al.
JAMA 2009;302:1277-1283.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT