Editorial
Fair comparison of mortality data following cardiac surgery
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Outcome based quality of care monitoring is currently the object of a lively debate, particularly in cardiac surgery. Medical, technical, and economical reasons subtend comparisons between surgeons, hospitals, or regions. This raises three major questions. What is the reference to compare with? In what form is information on surgical outcomes disclosed? How are random variations dealt with?
What is the reference to compare with?The surgical outcomes of a given centre are compared either to a recognised standard or to other centres' results.
Comparing to a standard, predictive models are used to compute risk
adjusted rates: the predicted risk is thus considered as a yardstick
for acceptable practice. The Parsonnet scoring system is the most
widely used for risk stratification in open heart surgery. The scores
were calculated more than 10 years ago (1982-1987) in the USA, and
involved over 3500 consecutive surgical procedures.1 The
system has proved its validity in predicting
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
-
Lawrance, R. A, Dorsch, M. F, Sapsford, R. J, Mackintosh, A. F, Greenwood, D. C, Jackson, B. M, Morrell, C., Robinson, M. B, Hall, A. S
(2001). Use of cumulative mortality data in patients with acute myocardial infarction for early detection of variation in clinical practice: observational study. BMJ
323: 324-327
[Abstract] [Full Text]
- Full Text
- Submit a response
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when eLetters are posted
- Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
