Each year US physician practices in four common specialties spend, on average, 785 hours per physician and more than $15.4 billion dealing with the reporting of quality measures. While much is to be gained from quality measurement, the current system is unnecessarily costly, and greater effort is needed to standardize measures and make them easier to report.

No abstract

The majority of women do not have the type of UI characterized, whereas there is underutilization of urinalysis. Given the widespread prevalence of UI and its implications on quality of life, greater adherence to guidelines is warranted.

We explore the impact of malpractice caps on non-economic damages that were enacted between 2003 and 2006 on the supply of physician labor, separately for high-malpractice risk and low-malpractice risk physician specialty types, and separately by young and old physicians. We use physician data from the Area Resource File for 2000–2011 and malpractice policy data from the Database of State Tort Law Reforms. We study the impact of these caps using a reverse natural experiment, comparing physician supply in nine states enacting new caps to physician supply in ten states that had malpractice caps in place throughout the full time period. We use an event study to evaluate changes in physician labor compared to the prior year. We find evidence that non-economic damage caps increased the supply of high-risk physicians <35 years of age by 0.93 physicians per 100,000 people in the year after the caps were enacted. Non-economic damage caps were cumulatively associated with an increase of 2.1 high-risk physicians <35 years of age per 100,000 people. Stronger non-economic damage caps generally had a larger impact on physical supply.

(Abstracted from Female Pelvic Med Reconstr Surg 2017;23:250–255) The importance of urinary incontinence (UI) to quality of life and the substantial costs of its treatment are well known. Guidelines on the assessment and subsequent management of the different types of UI have been published by various professional societies.