New Yorkers are given details on doctors' volume of work

Under the headline “More is better,” New York's Center for Medical Consumers posted information on its website (http://www.medicalconsumers.org/) about 44 procedures, mostly surgical: how many each doctor performed, how many were done at each hospital, and which doctors and centres did more than 30 procedures during 2001.

The report covers hundreds of thousands of cases and was based on data from New York state's Department of Health, which requires reporting of certain procedures done in hospitals.

New York state has about 19 million residents and about 260 acute care hospitals. As a result of lawsuits by newspapers, for …