Propublica releases Surgeon Scorecard
July 18, 2015
This past week saw the release of Propublica's Surgeon Scorecard. This is a tremendous milestone in terms of unveiling information that prospective patients can use to make more informed decisions when selecting a provider. Information about clinical quality has been difficult to come by, and Propublica has meaningfully pushed the boundary forward.
The overall reaction seems to be fairly positive. Granted, because Propublica relied on billing data from Medicare and because they limited the procedures of interest to specific elective surgeries, the number of surgeons identified in the database is less than 17,000. Some from the medical community have also taken issue with their methodology. The medical industry has had years (if not decades) to take the lead in releasing meaningful quality information to help patients decide. They have chosen to abdicate what was naturally in their domain, so criticism from them about this project mostly rings hollow. It's not that we think that the Surgeon Scorecard is perfect -- rather, we think that it's a significant step forward in an area that was otherwise relatively stagnant.
We applaud Propublica's effort and hope they continue to push the boundaries in acquiring broad data sets and applying thoughtful analysis to them to help patients select providers.