Assessing Cosmetic Rhinoplasty Outcomes

Developing effective methods to evaluate surgical outcomes is more important than ever. Peers, patients, and payers increasingly judge the quality of surgical procedures based on measurable outcomes. The government, health care review websites, and others are actively seeking benchmarks to compare our individual surgical results with those of other surgeons across the country and around the world. It is in our best interest to identify equitable methods of measuring our outcomes, and cosmetic surgery outcomes are among the most difficult to measure. Rating cosmetic results in rhinoplasty—with wide variability in what is considered ideal or is even possible for a given patient—is particularly challenging. Prior studies have examined patients' and surgeons' perceptions following rhinoplasty. However, both patients and surgeons have inherent biases that interfere with objective analyses of rhinoplasty outcomes. Unbiased casual observers are better suited to independently rate improvement following cosmetic rhinoplasty.