Hmm…mistakes in health care data? Who’d have imagined that. Which leads to lots of politics in the setting up and creation of these “high-performing networks” and of course the ability for the baby of improvement to be thrown out with the bathwater of data incompetence, if poorly introduced.

What am I talking about? Well you’ll have to read Jeremy Smerd at Workforce.com on what went wrong when Regence tried to introduce a high-performance network for Boeing. And then too about how Group Health of Puget Sound Puget Sound Health Alliance did it in a rather kindler, gentler and less lawsuit attracting way.

It’s in the end the employers’ fault. There the ones who told their plans to back off from doing this when costs were (apparently) under control in the 1990s. So the plans gave up on limiting their networks, and as a partial consequence, costs went up, and then the cycle starts again. Of course, the same thing will be true for the whole P4P movement.