ProPublica's Surgeon Scorecard provides a unique quality-of-care metric, based on an analysis of nearly 17,000 surgeons performing one of eight elective procedures in Medicare. This dataset is the raw data behind our online lookup tool.

The data, which has been carefully adjusted for differences in patient health, age and hospital quality, reveals wide variations in complication rates for some of the most routine elective procedures. We focused on eight common elective surgeries – knee replacements, hip replacements, three types of spinal fusions, one in the neck and two in the lower back, gall bladder removals, prostate removals, and prostate resections.

Derived from billing records for in-patient hospital stays from 2009 through 2013, this data set includes:

• Basic identifying information for each included surgeon, as well as his/her performance measures, including the Adjusted Complication Rate, by procedure.
• Basic descriptive information for each hospital as it appears in Surgeon Scorecard
• A crosswalk that allows the matching of surgeons to hospitals
• A table of "low-volume" surgeons who performed at least one, but fewer than 20 of a particular procedure in our data.

Read a longer, more technical methodology and its appendices.

Additional Terms

You will not use this data, alone or in combination with any other data, to de-anonymize patients or to determine the actual count of complications or procedures in cases where they've been redacted.