Managed care: provider profiling.

The Physician Payment Review Commission has examined the potential of profiling physician practice patPR. Lee and A.B. Bindman, Institute for Healty Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco. P.R. Lee, D.W. Shapiro and R.D. Lasker, Physician Payment Review Commission. A.B. Bindman, Division of General Internal Medicine, San Francisco General Hospital. terns within the context oi cost containment and quality assurance. Profiling has the capacity to provide information about service use, quality of care, and costs. It uses epidemiological methods to document practice patterns and to compare the practice patterns of different providers. Profiling can be used to characterize the