The American Medical Association has sent letters to the largest health insurers in the U.S., asking for immediate action to improve the accuracy, reliability and transparency of physician ratings.

The AMA’s action was in response to new reports that patients are receiving inaccurate profiles of doctors from health insurance companies.

The letters were cosigned by 47 state medical societies and called on each health insurer to publicly document the accuracy of its physician cost profiles by submitting the programs for external review by unbiased, qualified experts.

“Patients should always be able to trust that insurers are providing accurate and reliable information on physicians,” said AMA President Cecil B. Wilson, a doctor, in a statement. “Studies show that economic evaluations of individual physicians are so unreliable that they are more often wrong than right.”

Wilson said a series of studies recently conducted by researchers at RAND Corp. confirm the AMA’s “longstanding contention that serious flaws exist” in health insurer programs that attempt to rate individual physicians based on economic criteria.

One RAND study shows that physician ratings conducted by health insurers can be wrong up to two-thirds of the time for some groups of physicians. Under the best circumstances, insurers misclassified one-fourth of all physicians.

The AMA said this study and others “call into question the use of cost-profiling tools to control health care spending and provide the public with information.”

“Transparent, accurate information is critical when selecting a physician,” Wilson said. “Patients deserve to know that insurers are offering physician ratings that have a high risk of error and should not be the sole basis for selecting a physician.”

Wilson said patients must have accurate information to choose the right doctor.

“Flawed physician profiling programs help no one and hurt many by causing confusion and apprehension among patients and eroding confidence and trust in caring physicians,” Wilson said. “Given the damage these error-filled reports can cause, insurers have an important public responsibility to reevaluate whether physician cost profiling is working as intended.”

By working cooperatively with each health insurer to reevaluate physician profiling programs, the AMA and supporting state medical societies hope to address the concerns raised by the RAND studies, the doctors’ group said.