Today's Debate: Time to Dump QIOs?

Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) were created to make sure Medicare provided what its clients deserved.

But some doctors say they have become monsters, a special interest which, like No Child Left Behind, dumbs down medicine to artificial benchmarks.

Now Sens. Charles Grassley and Max Baucus (top right), both of whom count the AMA among their biggest fans,  have introduced S. 1947, which aims to rein them in.

The bill would let the QIOs continue to measure hospital performance, but strip them of the right to investigate complaints. The QIO industry, naturally, is not amused.

Grassley and Baucus, who together head the Senate Finance Committee, say QIOs that also act as consultants to hospitals have a built-in conflict of interest, which means they don't represent patients.

This is the kind of inside baseball story which looks boring but quickly gets down to questions of IT.

The standards the QIOs measure can be measured, the results digitized, networked, and tracked.

The "patient outcome" measures  advocated by reformers like Dr. Stanley Feld are more empirical, less black-and-white, therefore less subject to automation.

Which is why insurers, and not the medical profession, are running healthcare today.