Patient safety and patients' rights.

Upon initial examination, efforts toward achieving these 2 goals appear philosophically complementary. For example, both tout as a primary benefit improvement of access to health care services. However, closer inspection of these initiatives' more prominent features reveals seemingly irreconcilable demands. As described below, the push toward consumer-driven health plans as a way to offer affordable employer-based health coverage (and, hence, advance the first goal) requires that comprehensive information be available about individual physicians. The patient safety movement's advocacy for the creation of a confidential medical error reporting system (that would serve the second goal) requires safeguarding individual physician information from the public.