MD, FACS. Surgeon for thirty years. Founder for the rest.
He spent a career inside the most delicate corner of the human head. Then he looked up, saw a referral system that wasn't built for patients, and started over.
Ask most surgeons what they do and they will tell you about the operating room. Ask Sanjay Prasad and he is more likely to tell you about the appointment that came before it - the referral, the second opinion that never happened, the procedure a patient agreed to without ever knowing whether it was the right one, or whether it was needed at all.
Today Prasad runs SurgiQuality, the company he founded in 2014 under the parent entity SurgiPrice, Inc., alongside a sister service called SurgiConnect. The premise is almost stubbornly simple: a patient facing surgery should be able to find a best-in-class surgeon for their specific condition, compare quality on metrics that actually matter, and avoid operations they do not need. The platform now lists more than 30,000 surgeons across over 50 states, with partnerships at close to 300 surgery centers and hospitals.
It is a strange second act for a man who built one of the Washington, D.C. area's specialized surgical practices. But Prasad does not treat it as a departure. He treats it as the same job, scaled. Where he once fixed one patient at a time, he is now trying to fix the path every patient walks before they ever meet a surgeon.
The work has a particular edge to it. SurgiQuality anonymizes patient records before they reach a surgeon, stripping out race, ethnicity and insurance information so that a case is judged on medical merit alone. It is a deliberate design choice, aimed squarely at the racial disparities that haunt surgical outcomes. Prasad has made that fight a second career of its own, founding the Race and Health Foundation in 2022 and co-editing a 2023 guide on health equity for employers.
He is, in other words, that rare founder who is also the customer, the clinician, and the critic all at once. He has been the surgeon on the receiving end of a bad referral. He has watched the system route patients by geography and insurance rather than skill. And instead of writing one more op-ed about it, he built the thing he wished existed.
"The system is not working on behalf of the patients."
Prasad arrived in the United States in 1962. He was one year old, and the journey took a month by ship. It is the kind of origin that tends to make a person take nothing for granted - including the systems everyone else has learned to live with.
He went to the University of Maryland and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in biochemistry, then earned his MD at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His surgical training took him to Georgetown University Hospital for otolaryngology - head and neck surgery - before a fellowship year at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in 1990.
Pittsburgh is where the specialization deepened into something rare. Prasad trained across three sub-specialties: neurotology, cranial base surgery, and advanced head and neck oncologic surgery. These are the operations performed in millimeters, where the margin for error is the width of a nerve.
Back in Washington, he founded Metropolitan NeuroEar Group and practiced for the better part of three decades, publishing in peer-reviewed journals and serving on the clinical faculty at George Washington University School of Medicine. By any measure, it was a complete career. He chose to start another one.
Surgeons are ranked on procedure-specific metrics - complication rates, surgical volume - so a patient can compare on outcomes rather than proximity or guesswork.
A HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based records platform distributes a patient's data to multiple surgeons at once, with a concierge guiding the journey.
Records are anonymized - race, ethnicity and insurance removed - so surgeons evaluate the case itself. A direct strike at disparities in surgical care.
Immigrates to the United States from India at age one - a month-long voyage by ship.
Completes fellowship training at UPMC in neurotology, cranial base, and head & neck oncologic surgery.
Practices otology, neurotology and skull base surgery in D.C.; founds Metropolitan NeuroEar Group.
Founds SurgiPrice, Inc. with subsidiaries SurgiQuality and SurgiConnect.
Publishes Resetting Healthcare: Post COVID-19 Pandemic, The Patient's Handbook.
SurgiQuality closes a $5M Series A funding round.
Launches the Race and Health Foundation, focused on racial inequities in healthcare.
Co-edits Race Forward: The Health Equity Guide for Employers.
"If you can't sleep at night thinking about it, you're barking up the wrong tree."
When the pandemic stalled elective surgery and laid bare how little patients knew about quality, Prasad wrote. Resetting Healthcare: Post COVID-19 Pandemic, The Patient's Handbook is exactly what its subtitle promises - a guide for the person on the other side of the system, written by someone who has stood on both sides of it.
The equity work followed the same instinct. In 2022 he founded the Race and Health Foundation. In 2023 he co-edited Race Forward: The Health Equity Guide for Employers. The throughline from his surgical practice to his company to his books is unmistakable: information, fairly distributed, changes outcomes.
SurgiQuality has drawn interest from Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and large employers - the parties who pay for surgery and increasingly want to know they are paying for the right one. Prasad's bet is that transparency is not a feature. It is the whole product.
Neurotology, cranial base, and head & neck oncologic surgery - a stack of specialization most surgeons never attempt.
Magna cum laude in biochemistry before medical school. The analytical streak shows in a company built on metrics.
The venture started as "SurgiPrice." The patient-facing brand became "SurgiQuality" - the word that mattered moved to the front.
He immigrated to the U.S. at age one - a month-long journey by ship in 1962.
He spent nearly 30 years operating in otology, neurotology and skull base surgery.
SurgiQuality lists more than 30,000 surgeons and partners with nearly 300 centers.
He anonymizes patient records on purpose - to take bias out of surgical decisions.
Surgeon, founder, author, equity advocate, faculty member. The resume keeps branching.