Two new websites backed by nonprofit groups publish surgeons’ rates of complications and surgeries.
For years, if you wanted to order a pizza, you could consult multiple sources, like Yelp or Google Reviews, to see which one was the best.
And only your dinner was at stake.
But if you wanted rating information for doctors performing high-risk surgeries, the same subjective control given to Domino’s order was all that was available.
This made no sense to Stephen Engelberg. Especially considering preventable hospital errors are now the third leading cause of death in the United States — resulting in 440,000 deaths annually.
So Engelberg, editor-in-chief of the nonprofit ProPublica, decided a year ago to use big data to peel back the curtain to give patients an accurate picture of who’s holding the scalpel during these procedures.
“These days, consumers can review ratings for everything from plumbers to hairdressers to the latest digital cameras,” he wrote in a editorial published on Tuesday. “The surgical process involves some of the most consequential decisions any of us ever makes. So we started with the view that the taxpayers who pay the cost of Medicare should be able to use its data to make the best possible decisions about their health care.”
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ProPublica released Surgeon Scorecarda search engine using data from 63,173 Medicare patients who were readmitted to the hospital after eight elective procedures from 2009 to 2013.
These surgeries were knee replacement, hip replacement, gall bladder removal, lumbar spine fusion – both posterior and anterior technique – prostatectomy, prostate removal and cervical spine fusion.
During this period, 3,405 Medicare patients died during their hospital stay for these elective procedures.
But instead of taking the data at face value, the ProPublica team evaluated hospital readmissions and surgeon errors to give potential patients an idea of who has high rates of complications.
In 1999, a report from the Institute of Medicine, entitled “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” called for a national reporting system for serious adverse events, including death, associated with hospital procedures.
However, no such system has been established.
In light of government inaction on the growing problem, ProPublica used Medicare data to create the database that evaluates data specific to surgeons—not just hospitals—related to complications arising from these common procedures.
“Our reports suggest that this reluctance to focus on individuals is one reason why patient harm has continued in the face of considerable effort by the medical establishment,” Engelberg wrote.
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While the ProPublica database rates surgeons on their best and worst days, another new search engine, SurgeonRatings.orgit ignores surgeons with low scores and focuses on those with higher success rates.
The website, supported by the non-profit organization Consumer Checkbook/Service Study Centeranalyzed more than 4 million procedures performed by 50,000 surgeons in the United States.
The site does not include ProPublica’s “buyer beware” type of scenarios, only those doctors with positive reviews of the surgeries.
These procedures include pacemaker surgery, femur fracture repair, gallbladder removal, heart bypass, hernia repair, hysterectomy, major bowel surgery, prostate removal, and spinal cord fusion.
“For more than 20 years, we’ve evaluated hospital performance using these kinds of data, and we’ve spent many years lobbying and suing the federal government to release physician data,” the website says. “Thanks to some forward-thinking people in government, it’s finally now available.”
Now, as more big data sets become publicly available, consumers can expect to better see the practices and outcomes of those providing care in the US health care system, an industry that has reached $2.9 trillion in spending in 2013.
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