This is an explicit way to pressure physicians who order too many tests. Think of Medicare as just another large health insurer looking to cut costs:
CMS has the data and computer capacity to identify physicians who are inefficient compared with their colleagues and as early as mid-2008 might begin to contact those physicians and ask them to become more efficient . . . Kuhn said that identification of inefficient physicians, or “profiling,” would involve a comparison of the number of tests ordered by physicians for certain types of patients with the number ordered by colleagues in cases that have the same outcome.
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