Finding a specific surgeon’s complication rate is harder than most patients expect. No single website lists every surgeon’s outcomes the way you can look up restaurant reviews. But by combining several public tools, specialty databases, and direct questions, you can piece together a meaningful picture of a surgeon’s track record before you agree to an operation.
Start With Medicare’s Care Compare Tool
The most accessible starting point is Medicare.gov’s Care Compare tool, which displays quality performance data for individual doctors and clinicians. CMS publicly reports scores from the Quality Payment Program, showing measure-level star ratings, percentage-based performance scores, and procedure volume data. Volume matters more than you might think, and Care Compare now lists it for 19 common procedures, including hip replacement, knee replacement, spinal fusion, coronary angioplasty and stenting, CABG (bypass surgery), hernia repair, mastectomy, cataract surgery, and colonoscopy.
The tool also shows which hospitals and facilities a surgeon is affiliated with, covering everything from hospitals to skilled nursing facilities to rehabilitation centers. This is useful because a surgeon’s outcomes are partly tied to where they operate. The limitation: Care Compare draws primarily from Medicare claims data, so it reflects the Medicare population and may not capture a surgeon’s full caseload.
Why Procedure Volume Is a Reliable Proxy
When you can’t find a surgeon’s exact complication rate, their annual procedure volume is the next best indicator. The connection between doing more surgeries and having fewer complications is one of the most consistent findings in surgical research. A 2024 study of more than 3,100 orthopedic surgeons found that patients of high-volume shoulder replacement surgeons had a 31% lower risk of major complications and a 29% lower risk of hospital readmission compared to patients of low-volume surgeons.
The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit that evaluates hospital safety, publishes specific volume thresholds it considers minimum standards for safe practice. Some of those benchmarks: 25 total knee or hip replacements per year, 20 bariatric surgeries, 20 mitral valve repairs, 15 lung cancer resections, 10 pancreatic cancer resections, and 10 carotid endarterectomies. If your surgeon falls below these numbers for the procedure you need, that’s worth a conversation. You can look up individual hospitals on Leapfrog’s website to see whether they meet these volume standards.
Volume alone isn’t the whole story. In the shoulder replacement study, 93% of low-volume surgeons still had complication rates below the national average. But as a screening tool when hard outcome data isn’t available, volume is the most practical number you can find.
Check Specialty Society Databases
Some surgical specialties maintain their own public reporting systems with risk-adjusted outcome data, and these are often more detailed than anything on a government website. The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) runs the most established example. Its public reporting program uses star ratings and composite performance scores for cardiac surgery programs, based on clinical registry data and nationally endorsed quality measures.
An analysis of the program’s first four years found that centers participating in public reporting had significantly better outcomes: 23.2% were rated high-performing compared to just 7.6% of non-reporting sites. Only 4.5% of reporting sites were rated low-performing, versus 13.8% of sites that didn’t participate. This self-selection is worth knowing. Programs confident in their outcomes are more likely to opt into public reporting, which means the absence of data can itself be a data point.
A handful of states also publish surgeon-level or hospital-level outcomes for specific procedures. Pennsylvania, through its Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), has been a leader in reporting cardiac surgery mortality rates, including pediatric heart surgery outcomes. New York State has published cardiac surgeon report cards for decades. These state reports vary widely in scope and detail, so search your state health department’s website to see what’s available.
Look Up Disciplinary and Malpractice Records
Complication rates and disciplinary history are different things, but checking both gives you a fuller picture. The Federation of State Medical Boards offers a free tool called DocInfo that pulls from a national database of physician licensure and disciplinary information. It shows whether a surgeon has faced board actions, license suspensions, or revocations of hospital privileges.
Your state medical board may provide even more detail, including the full text of disciplinary orders, malpractice payment information, criminal convictions, and sanctions from hospitals. The depth of information varies by state, but you can contact your board directly to ask what public records exist for a specific surgeon. Some states post malpractice judgments and settlements online; others require a phone call or written request.
What About Third-Party Scorecard Sites?
If you’ve come across the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard, know that it was last updated in July 2015 using data from 2009 to 2013. ProPublica itself now labels it as a “historical snapshot” only. There is no current equivalent that provides surgeon-level complication rates drawn from national claims data for the general public. Sites like Healthgrades and U.S. News publish hospital-level quality ratings and some physician profile information, but their surgeon-specific data is generally limited to patient experience reviews, board certifications, and affiliations rather than clinical outcomes.
Understanding Risk-Adjusted Rates
When you do find complication data, check whether it’s risk-adjusted. Raw complication rates can be misleading because surgeons who take on sicker, more complex patients will naturally have higher complication numbers. Risk adjustment accounts for factors like a patient’s overall health status, age, functional ability before surgery, wound type, and nutritional status (measured by a blood protein called albumin). Of these, a patient’s overall health classification is the single largest factor, accounting for about 17% of the variation in complication risk.
A surgeon at a major referral center who operates on patients other hospitals have turned away will look worse in raw numbers but may actually be more skilled. This is why a single complication percentage, taken out of context, can steer you in the wrong direction. Risk-adjusted rates, star ratings from programs like STS, and composite scores that combine multiple quality measures are all more reliable than a single raw number.
Ask Your Surgeon Directly
Sometimes the most effective approach is the most straightforward. Johns Hopkins Medicine recommends asking your surgeon these specific questions: How many times have you performed this exact procedure? What is your personal complication rate? What is your success rate? Whether or not they give you a precise number, their willingness to engage with the question tells you something. A surgeon who regularly tracks their own outcomes and can speak to them openly is generally one who takes quality improvement seriously.
Other useful questions to pair with these: Are you board-certified in the specific specialty covering this surgery? Do you participate in a national quality registry like NSQIP or STS? What does recovery typically look like for your patients, and how does that compare to published benchmarks? Ask about the most common complications for your specific procedure and how often they see them in their own practice. You can also ask if the hospital where they operate has been evaluated by the Leapfrog Group and what its safety grade is.
No single source will hand you a clean, reliable complication rate for every surgeon. But combining volume data from Care Compare, safety ratings from Leapfrog, specialty registry scores where available, state and federal disciplinary records, and a direct conversation with your surgeon gives you a far more complete picture than any one tool alone.