Cancer Surgery At Low-Volume Hospitals In California

More than 100 years ago, Boston Surgeon Dr. Ernest Amory Codman took note of data on surgeries at a small semi-private hospital and some other larger and more prestigious hospitals. “They clearly showed,” he wrote, “that the semi-private hospital not only did more operations, but that the mortality was much lower, especially in some of the more difficult branches of surgery.” Not quite 50 years ago, results from the National Halothane Study produced some of the first solid statistical evidence of a link between the volume of services and outcomes. Since then, the work of numerous investigators has solidified and expanded the evidence linking volume and outcomes for many treatments, particularly those that are complex and demanding. A 2000 Institute of Medicine report on this topic noted the history and, looking more recently, found 88 studies that tracked groups of patients treated since 1980. While a complete understanding of the mechanisms and subtleties of the relationship between volume and outcomes has yet to be achieved, the value of considering volume of services as an element of quality improvement has never been clearer. Even so, many patients continue to receive procedures from health care providers who only infrequently do those procedures. Studying The Volume Of Surgeries With support from the California HealthCare Foundation, we recently worked with a group of investigators to study the volume of surgeries for common cancers done in California hospitals (...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Featured Health Professionals Hospitals Organization and Delivery Quality California hospital volume Physicians surgery Source Type: blogs