Top New York surgeon: Americans have better data for choosing restaurants than surgeons. That has to change

Americans comparison-shop for everything. Almost everything, that is.

People scrutinize product reviews before making even minor Amazon purchases. They research restaurants based on Google and Yelp ratings. They spend hours meticulously investigating the merits of different hotels and cruise ships.

But when the time comes to choose a surgeon for a major procedure — a decision far more consequential than any online purchase, dinner reservation, or vacation itinerary — most Americans don’t realize they can, and should, shop around.

Instead, they rely on referrals from primary care physicians or recommendations from friends and family. Those referrals are well-intentioned, but they are not always grounded in objective performance metrics.

That’s a problem. Research consistently shows that outcomes for the same procedure vary widely from one hospital to another, and even from one surgeon to another within the same hospital network. Patients deserve access to this data, so they can choose the best care.

A landmark New England Journal of Medicine study found that patients undergoing certain high-risk procedures at hospitals that only occasionally hosted those operations faced substantially higher mortality rates than those treated at high-volume centers, with differences in rates reaching 12% for some operations. Another study found that patients........

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