Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 19, 2025
Simulator Training for Endovascular Neurosurgery
Published on: May 6, 2020
Efficient evaluation of center-level emergency surgery performance using a high-yield procedure set: A step towards
Justin S Hatchimonji1, Elinore J Kaufman2, Phillip M Dowzicky1
1Department of Surgery, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Background:
Emergency general surgery (EGS) lacks mechanisms to compare performance between institutions. Focusing on higher-risk procedures may efficiently identify outliers.
Methods:
EGS patients were identified from the 2016 State Inpatient Databases of Florida, New York, and Kentucky. Risk-adjusted mortality was calculated as an O:E ratio, generating expected mortality from a model including demographic and procedural factors. Outliers were centers whose 90% confidence intervals excluded 1. This was repeated in several subsets, to determine if these yielded outliers similar to the overall dataset.
Results:
We identified 45,430 EGS patients. Overall, 3 high performing centers and 5 low performing centers were identified. Exclusion of appendectomies and cholecystectomies resulted in a remaining data set of 13,569 patients (29.9% of the overall data set), with 2 high performers and 5 low performers. One low performer in the limited data set was not identified in the overall set.
Conclusion:
Evaluation of 5 procedures, making up less than a third of EGS, identifies most outliers. A streamlined monitoring procedure may facilitate maintenance of an EGS registry.
