Researchers who had been using Fitbit data to help predict surgical outcomes have a new method to more accurately gauge how patients may recover from spine surgery.
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Spine. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.
At a time when hospitals are increasingly subject to online rankings or pay-for-performance reimbursement programs, metrics based on hospital administrative data are unreliable for profiling hospital performance, concludes the new research by Jacob K. Greenberg, MD, MSCI, of Washington University in St Louis and colleagues. They write, These results provide important insights into the advisability of using administrative billing data to benchmark hospital quality in spine surgery.
Study finds unacceptably low hospital rankability for spinal fusion
The researchers analyzed more than 367,000 spinal fusion surgery procedures performed in nine states between 2010 and 2017, drawn from nine state inpatient databases. Performed in patients with degenerative spine disease, spinal fusion is a common and costly inpatient surgical procedure. The study included data on approximately 154,000 proced