olga_pierce

We love sharing data at ProPublica and do so whenever we can. But the release of this data raises important patient privacy concerns since so many data points are included for each patient. Because of that, we've signed a data use agreement with Medicare that prohibits us from just sharing data.

That's a really good point: we included 95% confidence intervals in the scorecard. But a common misinterpretation of confidence intervals is that a surgeon's "true" rate is equally likely to be anywhere in the interval. But this is not the case. That's why our presentation of confidence intervals is weighted to show a darker gray where probability is most dense.

Great question. We limited our count of readmissions to those that are unscheduled. So a patient who was readmitted to a rehab facility wouldn't count against a surgeon.

And to further clarify - we don't even count all unscheduled readmissions. We had panels of experts look at principal diagnosis codes of readmissions to identify those that were likely related to surgery. So if a patient comes back within 30 days because of dementia or the flu, for example, that also is not included in a surgeon's rate.

Great question. Our panel of experts reviewed every single cause of readmission that occurred in our data at least twice in the country over 5 years.