No surgery should ever be considered minor, but it’s obvious that some operations are much more extensive and risky than others. When you’re having a major operation, you want to seek out some of the best and brightest doctors in the business. Today, we examine how surgery survival rates fluctuate based on which hospital patients use.
A new report by Leapfrog Group and Caslight Health Inc. found that which hospital you trust for surgery can literally “mean the difference between life and death,” said Leapfrog Group’s Erica Mobley.
Researchers noted that hospital rating systems often use a variety of different measures, so they wanted to examine a less-subjective method – mortality rates for certain surgeries.
“When it comes to major surgery, it’s hard to think of an outcome more important than whether you live or die,” said health policy professor Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not associated with the study. “It’s amazing there is such variability in mortality from these common surgeries, and patients should know that.”
Surgery Success Study
For their study, researchers asked hospitals for 2013 data on four risky surgeries, including the number of operations and patient deaths. The four surgeries they studied were:
- Pancreatectomy (Removal of part of all of the pancreas, typically to treat cancer).
- Esophagectomy (Removal of all or part of the esophagus).
- Abdominal aortic aneurysm repair.
- Aortic valve replacement.
By examining surgeries and mortality rates, researchers were able to come up with a predicted survival rate for the four operations. When comparing the survival rates from different hospitals, researchers uncovered:
- For pancreatectomy predicted survival rates ranged from 81 percent to 100 percent.
- For esophagectomy expected survival rates ranged between 88 percent and 98 percent.
- For abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, survival rates ranged from 88 percent to 98 percent.
- For aortic value replacement, expected survival rates ranged between 92 percent and 97 percent.
The study did not examine which types of hospitals – be it nonprofit, for-profit or regional centers – had a higher expected survival rate, but the study shows that you certainly should do some research into the hospital you go to for an operation.