&gt; if a doctor is regularly taking 2 standard deviations longer to perform same procedures as the rest of his&#x2F;her peers, that&#x27;s a red flag<p>FYI defining the &quot;peers&quot; part of that calculus is the hard part. Physicians choose their patients. Those that choose low hanging fruit do quite well in metrics. It doesn&#x27;t require much skill to pick low hanging fruit. It turns out that those who are good at picking fruit from the top of the tree, tend to be called on to pick fruit from the top of the tree.<p>Individual procedure codes in no way communicate anything about difficulty.