Another Look at ProPublica Rating System

A week after ProPublica put its “surgeon scorecard” online for public use, HealthLeaders Media published a commentary on its flaws. The database uses Medicare billing records on death and complication rates of common surgeries to rate individual surgeons. Jeffrey B. Matthews, MD, professor of surgery and chair, department of surgery, at the University of Chicago offers his opinion in the article. Dr. Matthews said, “The confidence intervals are so wide that an apparently medium-risk surgeon might in fact be high-risk or low-risk, and then you are trying to compare that to, say an apparently low-risk surgeon with just-as-wide confidence levels.” Full story.