Who: Dr. Robert Centor
Blog: db's Medical Rants
About the blogger: Centor is an academic general internist at the University of Alabama School of Medicine (UASOM). He serves as associate dean for the Huntsville Regional Medical Campus of UASOM and is a frequent ward attending at the Birmingham VA Hospital.
What makes this blog so fierce? Centor is not afraid to swim upstream against a strong current. Case in point: his sustained rants about "quality reporting."
Focus: Internal medicine, American healthcare, and medical education
Quote: "There are many reasons to object to 'quality reporting.' First, they are not measuring quality but rather pieces of quality. The pieces usually refer to measures on the management of some common diseases [e.g., diabetes mellitus, CHF, hypertension]. Second, the measures come from administrative data rather than from evaluating actually patient care. The measures often ignore patient characteristics, yet patient characteristics make a difference....The 'quality' movement represents a desire to measure physicians, a desire that reflects an unhealthy obsession in our society."