Hospital Outcomes in Inpatient Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy in Medicare Patients

Objective: To compare the risk-adjusted outcomes of hospitals in inpatient Medicare laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Background: Reduced length-of-stay for inpatient surgical care requires the inclusion of objective postdischarge outcomes to provide a comprehensive assessment of hospital and surgeon performance for quality improvement. Methods: The 2010 to 2012 Medicare Limited Data Set was used to develop risk-adjusted prediction models of inpatient deaths, prolonged length-of-stay outliers, 90-day postdischarge deaths, and 90-day readmissions for inpatient laparoscopic cholecystectomy. To define the opportunity for improved performance, prediction models were used to compute z scores and risk-adjusted adverse outcome rates for all hospitals in the database that had 20 or more evaluable cases for the study period. Results: A total of 83,274 patients from 1570 hospitals had an overall adverse outcome rate of 20.7%; 48 hospitals had outcomes that were 2 z scores better than predicted and 76 had 2 z scores poorer than predicted. Risk-adjusted adverse outcomes were 10.0 % in the best performing decile of hospitals and were 32.1% in the poorest performing decile. Gastrointestinal, infectious, and cardiopulmonary complications of care were the most common causes of readmissions with 46.3% occurring between days 30 and 90 after discharge. Conclusions: Comparative analysis of overall risk-adjusted inpatient and 90-day postdischarge adverse outcomes identifies considerable opportunity for improved care in this high-risk population of patients.