The Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development released hospital and surgeon death rates last week for a common surgical procedure for treating coronary heart disease.

This report is part of a statewide push for more transparency in health care, state officials said. (Read "Hospital rating below average," which was in Saturday's Californian.)

But some hospital officials and surgeons worry that reports like this will push doctors to cherry pick patients, turning away older, riskier patients out of fear they will have more deaths and black marks in future reports.

"People are dying because of what the state of California is doing," said  Dr. Ismael Nuno, chief of cardiac surgery service at Los Angeles County USC Medical Center, in the San Francisco Chronicle's story. "Surgeons are walking away and saying, 'Tough, it's either my career or your death.'"

Jon Van Boening, Bakersfield Memorial Hospital's president and CEO, shared this sentiment.

His mother was almost turned down for heart surgery a year and a half ago because she was 87 and at higher risk, Van Boening said. She survived, but would have died without the surgery, he said.

"That's what the OSPHD people don't understand," he said. "That's the danger of this statistic."

Memorial was one of six hospitals that got a "worse rating" for it's death rate. The hospital performed 600 bypass graft procedures and had an adjusted death rate of 5.13 percent. The state average was 3.08 percent.

The report takes into account sicker patients, said Joseph Parker, director of the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development's Health Care Outcomes Center.

"Some of them have talked about not performing surgery on certain kinds of patients," he said. "Those kinds of reactions come from a misunderstanding of how this report is computed."

Hospital officials are also pointing to the fact that some of the state's best hospitals, which often take on sicker patients, were dinged in this study, such as the UCSF Medical Center.

"Ironically, the state released the report a day before U.S. New & World Report came out with its annual hospital rankings. In the magazine's 'Best Hospitals' edition, UCSF Medical Center earned 'honor roll' status for scoring at or near the top in at least six of 16 specialties," another Chronicle story said. "The flagging of top-flight surgeons and top-flight medical centers has raised the hackles of both doctors and hospitals who have argued for years that the system does not give sufficient weight to those who take on the most difficult cases."

Do you think the potential turning away of sicker patients is a legitimate worry or are hospitals and surgeons stung by this report just lashing out by scaring consumers?

Is there a negative side to having medical information at your fingertips?