Strong Public Desire for Quality and Price Transparency in Shoulder Arthroplasty

Concerted efforts to optimize outcomes and data transparency in shoulder arthroplasty have led to the creation of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Shoulder and Elbow Registry, the first nationwide registry of its kind. We used online crowdsourcing to explore the general public's perceptions and beliefs toward the disclosure of quality and price data in shoulder arthroplasty.

A total of 498 participants recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) completed a survey regarding beliefs about public disclosure of quality and price data in shoulder arthroplasty. The MTurk is an online marketplace for crowdsourcing tasks (e.g., answering surveys) to a pool of over 500,000 registered workers in exchange for financial compensation. Requesters post human-intelligence tasks, and workers can respond to those that they are interested in completing. This web-based platform is an efficient survey tool for medical research, with comparable national representativeness to traditional convenience samples.

The majority (95%) of respondents believed surgeons and hospitals should share their data with national registries such as the AAOS Shoulder and Elbow Registry. Most believed that patients considering shoulder arthroplasty should have public access to surgeons' outcomes and complication rates (96%), years of experience (95%), and case volume (92%). Most respondents desired price transparency in implant costs (95%), surgeon reimbursement (80%), and hospital reimbursement (84%). In decreasing order of importance, the top three factors guiding surgeon choice were: (1) surgeon included in the insurer's network, (2) annual case volume, and (3) publicly available outcomes.

Increased quality and price transparency in shoulder arthroplasty may empower patients to make better-informed decisions about their care and ultimately enhance value. Given the strong public desire for data transparency and the notion that public disclosure of data is intrinsically associated with performance improvement, surgeons and hospitals should strongly consider submitting their data to national registries such as the AAOS Shoulder and Elbow Registry.