That's the theory - That patient satisfaction surveys will uncover the bad providers.
But in the real world, if someone is receiving bad care they don't continue making followup appointments with that doctor. Nobody continues going back to the same bad doctor over and over again and writing negative reviews. It's really easy to calculate churn rate for individual providers.
The hot topic now is tracking outcomes: The idea is that with enough data collection and crunching, we can eventually start tracking which providers have better outcomes among their patients. This is one of those things that sounds great on paper but has a lot of challenges in the real world. It's also prone to gaming, as we've seen from surgeons who have learned to avoid difficult cases so they can avoid the risk of another patient death statistic.
This is spot on. It's not the metric itself which is the problem, but how the metric is interpreted and formed into action. We can all understand the ramifications if we rated parents on "child satisfaction". Lots of kids would be having candy for dinner. The real metric we probably want is improved patient outcome, which may not be synonymous with patient satisfaction.
I don't think that's necessarily incongruent with the OPs point. If the metrics are being gamed or the metrics are being used to inaccurately gauge provider care, those are systemic issues. Or it could be the case of well-intentioned, but poorly chosen metrics.
But in the real world, if someone is receiving bad care they don't continue making followup appointments with that doctor. Nobody continues going back to the same bad doctor over and over again and writing negative reviews. It's really easy to calculate churn rate for individual providers.
The hot topic now is tracking outcomes: The idea is that with enough data collection and crunching, we can eventually start tracking which providers have better outcomes among their patients. This is one of those things that sounds great on paper but has a lot of challenges in the real world. It's also prone to gaming, as we've seen from surgeons who have learned to avoid difficult cases so they can avoid the risk of another patient death statistic.