VISION: The quality of medical primary care in Switzerland is excellent. Primary Care physicians remain the group of medical care deliverers with the highest importance both for prevention and treatment of important chronic diseases. MISSION: Physician Profiling tools that are inadequate, should be detected, eradicated and replaced. AIM: We aim to create or adopt a scientific (risk equalization) tool that allows to profile physicians in primary care and to help primary care physicians in developing strategies to protect them against inadequate physician profiling tools in Switzerland. NETWORK: We aim to expand our network to all parts of health care. TOOLS: We organize hearings, strategy discussions, scientific work on physician profiling tools, awareness campaings and symposia. KEY NOTE: Risk for patients can be derived from hidden rationing due to a high pressure to achieve cost savings. This is very problematic and has been discussed extensively on an ethical level, especially with respect to selective contracting. Since the amount of medical costs is directly dependant on the morbidity of patients we care for, we aim to integrate morbidity intophysician profiling. The final goal is to provide a rating and quality control tool that guarantees a maximum benefit in the therapy and prevention of diseases in primary care.This tool should also provide means to avoid the frequent encouterend problem of false positive "black sheep" among the medical community in the cost rating as performed by insurers in Switzerland. Since MD's in Switzerland need to update themselves on the problem, I have included and will constantly update a large literature reference list, for those who might be interested. Since primary care physicians are made responsible for the costs they generate - or better: have to generate - to care for their patients, hidden rationing - as communicated by the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences in July 2007 - has become a real issue that threatens the quality of our medical work and reduces our incentives in prevention. Since primary care physicians are not responsible for the case mix in their cabinet, risk equalization techniques have to be developed or existing tools have to be proposed, that are at the same time easy to use, meet the goal and demands in modern medicine, are reproducible, understandable and accetable. By the year 2012, risk equalization will become reality for hospitalized patients, albeit on a primitive level (including as a new variable the need for hospitalization in the previous year). For primary care physicians, risk equalization as performed by the ANOVA method is not acceptable, since this method does not include one morbidity variable. Costs due to morbidity are not normally distributed, but severly skewed, see graphic below. Therefore, such methods have a weak scientific ground for physician profiling. Therefore, it is mandatory to develop risk equalization models in ambulatory medicine (primary care), that may become operative by 2012. Since the development of a new risk equalization and profiling tool is very demanding and since it's realization is dependent of the acceptance by the key players in Swiss health care (statal authorities, insurers, trust centers, medical doctors), we, as a scientific group, ask you to participate in our effort. As an introduction I propose to read this working paper. This website is constantly updated. Keep bookmarked. And help us in understanding, how best in the future physician profiling can be performed in Switzerland. For the benefit of our patients. ORGANIZATION: The Association "Physician Profiling" was created on 06.06.2008 in Olten.