Surgeon Ratings Websites Aim to Make A Mark On Patient Care

Two new ratings websites use risk adjustment models that offer a more complete picture of quality care.

Last year, when the nonprofit news organization ProPublica released its “Surgeon Scorecard,” it was met with varying degrees of applause and criticism.

Some criticized the scorecard for using unreliable data points to rate surgeons’ complication rates and for failing to account for the many factors that can alter a patient’s outcome. Others praised the new tool as a “step in the right direction” while acknowledging some of its flaws.

Thanks to the attention surrounding ProPublica’s model, two other surgeon rating systems were released with much less fanfare, but both are aiming to make a mark on the healthcare industry by utilizing risk adjusted formulas that blend complication rates with the inherent risks of certain surgeries or patients.

The consumer advocacy group Consumers’ Checkbook launched SurgeonRatings.org(www.checkbook.org/surgeonratings) around the same time as ProPublica’s “Surgeon Scorecard,” but escaped the same barrage of criticism. Robert Krughoff, president of Consumers’ Checkbook in Washington, D.C., acknowledged that ProPublica has a much wider audience and therefore received much more attention. But Krughoff noted that Consumers’ Checkbook has been advocating for Medicare to publicly release quality data for more than 10 years, and in creating the ratings site, it turned to risk adjustment algorithms that have been studied for more than two decades.

The American College of Surgeons (ACS) released a statement shortly after the release of both rating systems criticizing “two public websites” without naming them specifically. ACS noted that rating a surgeon’s skill without considering risk factors or the fact that surgery is a team experience, “leads to an incomplete analysis.”

But Krughoff expresses confidence in the ratings system.

“We are drawing on methods we’ve used to evaluate hospitals in terms of death rates and adverse outcome rates and we’ve been doing that for about 20 years,” he says. “We have a lot of experience doing this, and we feel quite good about our methods.”

Several months later, in October 2015, a Washington-based startup called MPIRICA launched its own hospital and surgeon rating system, MPIRICA Quality Score. The company had launched a similar rating system for hospitals in January 2015.

Using Medicare data and a similar risk adjustment model to SurgeonRatings.org, MPIRICA developed a quality rating similar to a FICO credit score for more than 65,000 surgeons, allowing patients and employers that provided self-funded health plans to compare hospitals and surgeons on a level playing field. In April, MPIRICA announced it would also cover more than 1,000 outpatient procedures for nearly 40,000 surgeons.

This is an excerpt from the July issue of Patient Safety Monitor Journal. Subscribers can read the rest of the article here. Find out more about the journal, its benefits, and how to subscribe by clicking here.