In an act that would scare the pants off of any doctor the Freedom of Information minister in Scotland ruled that the mortality rates of the patients of the almost 1,000 surgeons in the country could be made publicly available.  In other words each of the surgeons’ success rates are now public knowledge. (Read about it here).

The head healthcare dude for the country said that he didn’t understand why the data was made available "because it did not provide details of individual patient cases."  Well, I’d argue that it would then be in the best interest of the doctors to make sure that the details were made available so that the public could have some context, but it is definitely in the public’s best interest to have this data available.

Now before you jump all over me here I think this is a two way street.  If we’re going to hold doctors accountable (which I argue for) then we need to also protect them from frivolous lawsuits, and I actually think that this kind of "sunshine" on doctor data will help doctors.  After all if we can say that 90% of patients that have a certain procedure die (100% die without it) then we can’t hold the surgeon responsible if it goes wrong.  On the other hand if 99% survive a procedure and a doctor manages to lose 10% of his patients then that’s another issue.

Of course I don’t see this becoming an issue in the US.  The medical establishment will fight "sunshine" laws until their last breath and lawyers will never go for anything that would put a crimp in their market.