12/26/2015    

E-HEALTH NEWS

Complication Rates of 16,000+ Surgeons Published

 

Using public data from the CMS Inpatient Limited Data Set, which includes every hospital visit by every Medicare patient in the study period, ProPublica journalists created a searchable database of surgical complications that resulted in deaths or readmissions within 30 days due to complications. 

 

The data set spans more than 200 variables, including the hospital, patient age, and gender, ICD-9 procedure and diagnosis codes, dates of admission, and discharge dates. Data journalists spoke to dozens of doctors, surgeons, and researchers who use the Medicare data, to develop the patient outcome measures used. While the tool was in development in 2014, CMS agreed to make unencrypted surgeon identifiers public for the first time, so that patients, procedures, complications, and surgeons could all be linked and examined by all.

 

Source: Univadis [12/23/15]