New tool lets you check a surgeon’s scorecard before he operates
When we buy flat screen TVs… or plunk down our hard-earned cash for new cars… we read the ratings and reviews to make sure we’re making the right decision.
But when we’re wheeled into an operating room, how much do we know about that surgeon we’re trusting with our lives?
For years a surgeon’s record was top secret. We were denied access to information on which surgeons were most likely to botch operations and leave us with serious – and even life-threatening – complications.
But thanks to a lawsuit from a public interest group, that data has finally become available.
Now, before you accept a referral to a surgeon, you’ll know whether he’s really one of the best – or if he should hang up his scalpel for good.
George developed serious infections and septic shock after a knee replacement at New York Methodist Hospital. The staff even told his family to say their goodbyes.
But what George didn’t know… and couldn’t have known… is that Dr. Henry Tischler, who performed the surgery, had one of the highest complication rates on knee replacements in the entire state of New York.
There are other surgeons like Dr. Tischler all over the country with records that would have patients running for the hills. But for years there was no way for people like us to tell which surgeons were highly skilled and which were barely competent.
Now that’s all starting to change.
At the end of last year — after an eight-year lawsuit from a public watchdog group — the federal government began releasing Medicare records showing how surgeons rate.
ProPublica has organized that data to rank the performance of more than 17,000 surgeons for eight common elective procedures: knee and hip replacements, keyhole gallbladder removal, two kinds of lumbar spinal fusion, neck spinal fusion, and two types of prostate surgery (I’ll show you how to access the database in a moment).
You can search by hospital, surgeon’s name, or even your address.
And it turns out that even when you select one of the top-rated hospitals in the country, you could end up with a surgeon with a spotty history.
For example, St. Joseph Hospital in southern California ranks in the top 50 nationally for its orthopedic department. But one of its surgeons, Dr. Gregory Carlson, has one of the highest complications rates found for spinal fusion operations.
Then there’s the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which has often been ranked the top hospital in America. But practicing there is Dr. Misop Han, whose complication rate for his prostate surgery patients is double the Medicare average and three times higher than his Johns Hopkins colleagues.
On the other hand, ProPublica found many top flight surgeons in some of the smaller hospitals and communities across America.
Dr. Aaron Joiner, who practices in a tiny community hospital in Northwest Alabama, had zero complications on 282 knee and hip replacements over five years. And Dr. Thomas Rasmussen in Leawood, Kansas has a perfect record for 348 knee replacements.
And there were hundreds of other doctors with perfect scores as well.
So there’s no reason to settle for second best – or even worse — when it comes to selecting a surgeon.
As George Lynch said, it’s better to be “a difficult live patient than a compliant dead patient.”
To check the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard, click here.
Sources:
“Shop for your surgeon using formerly confidential data” Ben Smart, July 15, 2015, CNN, cnn.com
“Making the cut” Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce, July 13, 2015, ProPublica, propublica.org
