Is my surgeon any good? Now you can find out

Surgery is a scary proposition. A lot can go wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous.

Surgical outcomes depend in large part on the quality of the surgeon, and quality can vary greatly. Some surgeons consistently avoid bad outcomes, while others have high rates of complications.

Now, there is a way to check on your surgeon before you go under the knife. ProPublica analyzed Medicare data for 17,000 surgeons at 3.500 hospitals nationwide and devised an interactive scorecard comparing complication rates in eight common procedures. (To see the scorecard, click here.)

The scorecard allows you to search by geographic area and procedure for charts that compare hospitals based on experience over the past five years. By clicking on an individual hospital, you can see the number of its physicians who fall into low, medium and high categories for complications, such as infections and internal bleeding. The tool also lets you see detailed data for individual physicians, such as the number of times he or she has performed the procedure and the number of those surgeries that resulted in bad outcomes. Exclamation marks warning about those that have surgeons with high complication rates.

The page for the Philadelphia area lists 35 hospitals. The local hospital with the lowest adjusted rate of complications for each procedure were as follows: St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, for knee replacement; Crozer Chester Medical Center in Upland for hip replacement; Main Line Health Bryn Mawr Campus for gallbladder removal; Univ. of Penn Health System for lumbar spinal fusion (posterior and anterior technique); Virtua West Jersey Hospitals in Berlin for prostate resection; and Penn Presbyterian Hospital for prostate removal.

In an accompanying article, ProPublica describes some of the trends in its data. A small number of surgeons account for a disproportionate share of complications – 11 percent account for 25 percent. At the other end of the quality spectrum, 756 surgeons who performed 50 or more procedures had no complications, and 1,423 had just one.

In health care, as in everything else, consumers should shop carefully. Medical errors are all too common, and the quality of hospitals and physicians varies considerably. Until recently, the main source of information for patients was the reputation of the provider and word-of-mouth assessments. Today, the Internet contains a range of tools for comparison shopping based on actual data.

If you are in the market for a health care service, using these tools can make the difference between a successful outcome and a medical disaster.

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