Best Hospitals for Knee Replacement Surgery Uncovered

Simply knowing that high volume hospitals have lower complication rates is a critical piece of information, if you are thinking about getting a knee replacement. No one wants complications. They jeopardize safety, cost money and waste a ton of time.

Finding out the actual volumes of knee replacement surgeries each hospital is doing without wasting a morning on the phone, listening to phone trees and risking profound aggravation, is another thing.

The wait is over. Now you can easily look up the hospitals located around your area code and get the results in under 1 minute. Fantastic.

The nerd wallet  is a website that has just launched a new service called the Best Hospitals Tool.

Go directly to the knee replacement page and enter your location and click on the “go” button.

Nerdwallet pre fills this section with the following: Knee or hip replacement or reattachment surgery without major complications.

At first this was confusing. Why the part about reattachment surgery? On my first attempt I deleted the extra verbiage and just typed knee replacement. Nothing came up. Nerd wallet is most likely using medicare categories that were already defined in the database.

A neat and easy to read graph comes up and you can pull data from that. You should be seeing the graph of Patient volume compared to hospital charges.

Screen Shot 2014-09-26 at 12.53.20 PM

200 Quality Benchmark

Remember for bigger markets there is a sider across the bottom that allows you to scroll from right to left  to find the best hospitals for knee replacement surgery in your area.

Conclusions from multiple studies have revealed that hospitals that perform over 200 surgeries annually have significantly less complications and better overall outcomes. They same principle holds true for surgeons. Find the best doctors for knee r  replacement surgery and not the ones who do general orthopedics.  For example, don’t make the mistake of finding a high volume hospital only to have your surgery performed  by a low volume surgeon. Fit both pieces of the puzzle together and significantly increase your chances of achieving a great outcome.

If you want to make your head swim, click on the tab that says hospital charges compared to medicare reimbursement. The discrepancies in pricing and reimbursement across facilities is hard to fathom.

Summary

  • Hospitals with over 200 total knee replacement surgeries have lower rates of infection, heart attacks, blood clots, pneumonia and death
  • 2,750 hospitals were evaluated
  • Only one in 4 hospitals meet the benchmark
  • 2 in 5 patients will not be treated in a benchmark hospital
  • The Hospital for Special Surgery in NY has the highest patient volume at 3,833 treated in 2011

If you were wondering what to take to the hospital for knee replacement surgery..Read more

best hospital knee replacement surgery
Michelle, PT
Michelle, PT

Michelle Stiles called "the no nonsense" therapist, by her patients, created a company called Cowboy Up Recovery after recognizing the bankruptcy of the present medical model. Too many people regard conventional medical wisdom as gospel, ignoring the subversive influences of Big Pharma and Big Medicine. She believes, Americans in general are being trained from an early age to defer to experts in numerous areas of life and losing the impulses for self-responsibility and self-reliance in the process. Over-diagnosis and over-medicating has become endemic. While thankful for the best miracles of modern medicine, she encourages people of all persuasions to listen to their bodies and seek out answers to maintain not just an absence of disease but optimal health. Her advice is: Cowboy Up, no one cares more about your health than you do.

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