A practicing surgeon spent three decades watching the same problem repeat. SurgiQuality is his answer: compare surgeons on real outcomes, get a second look before you go under.
Somewhere this week, a person was told they need surgery. They nodded, signed, and scheduled it - having met exactly one surgeon and compared exactly nothing. SurgiQuality exists for that moment, the quiet pause between "you need an operation" and "okay."
SurgiQuality is a health-technology company headquartered in Rockville, Maryland. It does something that sounds almost too obvious to need a startup: it lets patients compare surgeons before they choose one. Not on bedside manner or a five-star rating left by someone's cousin, but on risk-adjusted outcomes pulled from real medical records. The platform gathers a patient's records and imaging, lifts them to the cloud, and routes them to a network of more than 45,000 surgeons who write back with independent opinions - including, sometimes, the unglamorous verdict that surgery isn't needed at all.
For patients, it's free. For the self-insured employers footing the surgical bills, it's a way to stop paying for operations nobody needed. That's the whole company, more or less. The hard part was getting anyone in healthcare to agree it was a good idea.
Here is the strange thing about surgery. You can read forty reviews before buying a toaster, but when a doctor says you need a knee replaced, a disc fused, or a gallbladder out, the comparison shopping mostly stops there. Outcomes data exists - surgeons generate it with every case - but it sits locked inside electronic medical records, written in a language built for billing, not for patients.
So patients default to trust. Trust is lovely, right up until the numbers arrive. Roughly one in five working adults has a surgical procedure each year. By SurgiQuality's accounting, somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of surgical referrals may be unnecessary - operations that could be avoided, delayed, or done a different way. Every avoidable surgery carries its own risk, its own recovery, and occasionally its own sequel: the second operation booked to fix the first.
That gap - between the data surgeons have and the choices patients can actually make - is the tension the entire company is strung across. Close it, and patients pick better, employers pay less, and good surgeons finally get credit for being good. Leave it open, and everyone keeps guessing.
Dr. Sanjay Prasad spent more than 30 years as a neurotologist and cranial-base surgeon in the Washington, D.C. area - the kind of doctor other doctors send their hardest cases to. He trained at Georgetown, took a fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, and ran his own ambulatory surgery center. He had, by any measure, a complete career. He could have stopped there.
Instead, in 2014, he founded SurgiQuality (under the parent company SurgiPrice, Inc.) on a hunch born of repetition: he kept watching the same information problems play out across three decades and thousands of patients. Patients couldn't compare. Good surgeons couldn't prove they were good. Employers couldn't tell the difference. His co-founder, Marshall Besch, brought 30 years of healthcare operations and the unglamorous expertise that actually makes this work - turning messy EMR data into something you can score.
The founding story, the company likes to note, involves a family that once traveled by ship in search of a surgical specialist. A literal voyage for surgical quality. The bet was that you shouldn't need a boat - or a brother-in-law who happens to be a doctor - to find a good surgeon.
Founder & CEO, Chairman. 33 years a practicing surgeon and ASC operator. Author of "Resetting Healthcare."
Co-Founder & Data Operations. Three decades in healthcare delivery, quality, and finance. Turns EMR data into outcomes scores.
VP, Client Relations. Runs surgeon outreach, network development, and the relationships that keep 45,000 surgeons engaged.
A surgeon, a data operator, and a relationship-builder walk into healthcare. No punchline - they just started scoring everyone.
The mechanics are almost boring, which is how you know they're useful. A patient signs up. A concierge - reachable by phone, email, or chat, in multiple languages - helps gather their medical records and imaging. Those records go up to the cloud and out to surgeons in the network, who review the case and write back: is this surgery necessary, are there alternatives, and here are my own success and complication rates. The patient gets multiple independent written opinions instead of one verbal one.
Underneath sits the part that makes it scale. SurgiGPT, the company's AI, reads de-identified EMR records and scores surgeons on risk-adjusted outcomes - connecting directly to EMR systems to pull procedure-specific results. It's the difference between "this surgeon seems nice" and "this surgeon's outcomes for your exact procedure, adjusted for how sick their patients were." Star ratings, retired. Data, promoted.
Concierge gathers records, routes them to network surgeons for independent written opinions. Free to patients.
AI that scores surgeons on risk-adjusted outcomes from de-identified EMR data.
Compare surgeons on outcomes, not marketing - the toaster-reviews logic, finally applied to surgery.
Surgeon-facing app to manage cases and showcase validated outcomes to employers and payors.
Eleven years, one stubborn idea, and a network that grew faster than the elevator pitch.
Dr. Sanjay Prasad launches the parent company with subsidiaries SurgiQuality and SurgiConnect, after three decades of watching the same problems repeat.
Surgeon recruitment, surgery-center partnerships, and the records-to-cloud pipeline are built into a working platform.
SurgiQuality raises a $5M Series A round to scale its mission of connecting patients to best-in-class, cost-efficient surgeons.
The company leans into AI, using de-identified EMR data to score surgeons on risk-adjusted outcomes and arm employer benefit programs.
A national network spanning all 50 states plus DC, with partnerships across roughly 300 surgery centers and hospitals.
SurgiQuality's pitch lives or dies on a few statistics, so it's worth showing them plainly. The company built itself around the gap between how much surgery happens and how much of it is actually necessary.
Then there's the proof of reach. A network of 45,000-plus surgeons across all 50 states and DC. Partnerships with roughly 300 surgery centers and hospitals. A $5M Series A in 2021 to fund the build-out. None of it guarantees a perfect outcome - surgery never comes with guarantees - but it's the difference between a patient choosing blind and a patient choosing informed.
Plenty of healthcare startups talk about putting patients first while quietly billing them. SurgiQuality made the patient side free and pointed the invoice at employers - the parties who actually carry the cost of unnecessary surgery, readmissions, revisions, and the workdays lost to all three. It's a business model and a mission that happen to agree with each other, which is rarer in healthcare than it should be.
For self-insured employers, the math is direct: steer members toward high-outcome surgeons, use peer review to weed out the operations that don't need to happen, and watch the surgical line item shrink while employees recover faster. For surgeons with genuinely good results, SurgiGPT turns their outcomes into something they can show payors and negotiate with. Good work, finally legible.
The founder wrote a book about it - "Resetting Healthcare" - which tells you he sees this as bigger than one app. The thesis is that information, not just access, is what's broken in surgical care. Fix the information and the rest follows.
AI is about to flood surgical care, for better and worse. Models that read scans, predict complications, and parse records are arriving fast. The risk is the usual one: more automation pointed at doing more procedures, more efficiently. SurgiQuality is making a different bet - that the same AI can be pointed at restraint. At asking, before the incision, whether the incision belongs.
If that bet works, the quiet pause from the opening - the moment between "you need surgery" and "okay" - stops being a moment of blind trust. It becomes a moment with options in it. The patient pulls up a comparison. A few surgeons weigh in. Sometimes the answer is a better surgeon; sometimes it's no surgery at all. Either way, nobody travels by ship to find out.
That's the world SurgiQuality is quietly building toward, one second opinion at a time. Not flashy. Just the radical idea that before someone cuts you open, you should get to compare - and that the comparison should be free.