Our Mission
We believe patients deserve transparent, trustworthy information when choosing an orthopedic surgeon. OrthoProcedures was created to translate complex Medicare Part B data into practical insights that highlight the surgeons performing hip, knee, and shoulder replacements at the highest volumes. Rankings come from the 2024 service year, the most recent CMS release; earlier years back to 2013 power the volume trend charts on surgeon profiles.
Four decades of peer-reviewed research have found that patients of higher volume surgeons and hospitals record fewer complications and fewer early revisions. Linking American Joint Replacement Registry records from 2012 to 2017 with Medicare claims, Siddiqi and colleagues found the lowest volume surgeon and hospital pairing carried 1.63 times the adjusted odds of all-cause revision after hip replacement (95% CI 1.41 to 1.89) and 1.72 times after knee replacement (95% CI 1.44 to 2.06), which read the other way is roughly 39% lower odds of hip revision for the highest volume pairing (JAAOS 2022). This evidence is observational, so it shows association rather than cause, and the absolute differences are small even where the ratios are large. Every figure we publish, with its confidence intervals and its limits, is laid out in our medical sources library and on why volume matters.
What We Deliver
- State & City Rankings that list surgeons by verified Medicare procedure volume.
- Individual Surgeon Profiles with procedure counts, rankings, contact details, and nearby peers for comparison.
- Recovery & Coverage Guides that decode Medicare benefits, cost expectations, and home-prep best practices.
- Data Audit Reporting so you always know when our database was last synchronized with CMS records.
How We Build the Rankings
- Ingest the annual CMS Provider Utilization & Payment dataset covering more than 8,000 orthopedic surgeons and three core arthroplasty procedures.
- Normalize & Clean the raw claims data, handling naming variants, address changes, and subspecialty overlaps.
- Calculate Experience Scores by procedure type (hip, knee, shoulder) and by overall state volume.
- Verify & Monitor accuracy with automated API checks, manual spot reviews, and discrepancy alerts that trigger a 24‑hour correction window.
Guardrails Around the Data
- Rankings reflect Medicare fee-for-service claims, an estimated 25% to 33% of national hip replacement volume, 23% to 28% of knee replacement volume and 29% to 37% of shoulder replacement volume. Surgeons perform additional procedures for private insurance and Medicare Advantage plans that never enter this file. The derivation is on our methodology page.
- Procedure counts are a countable proxy for experience, not a measure of surgical skill or of your own likely outcome. You should also consider board certification, hospital quality, insurance coverage, and personal rapport.
- We never sell personally identifiable information. Aggregated usage analytics are used solely to improve the experience.
Our Transparency Promise
We publish methodology notes, audit dashboards, and sourcing details because informed decisions require credible inputs. If we uncover a discrepancy, we document the fix and communicate significant changes to subscribers. Questions are always welcome: contact our data team and we will respond within one business day.
Some of our written content (including explanatory guides, recovery-product summaries, and replies drafted through our contact form) is produced with the assistance of AI language models. Every AI-assisted piece is reviewed by a person before publication, and every statistic on this site must trace to a source that resolves, as described on our methodology page.
Next Steps
- Start with the state surgeon rankings
- Explore national high-volume surgeons
- Review the latest medicare recovery insights
Together we can make orthopedic care decisions clearer, faster, and more transparent for every patient.