Hospitals have a moral obligation to publicly release data on how often they opt for minimally invasive surgery, wrote Ira Leeds, MD, and Martin Makary, MD, who are both surgeons at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, in an op-ed for U.S. News & World Report.
Although minimally invasive surgery often results in fewer wound infections and opioid painkiller prescriptions, some hospitals rarely use the surgery for candidate patients, the authors wrote. They attribute the problem in part to surgeons who prefer a more traditional approach: "It's just how I like to do it" is a common justification, the authors said.
To combat the problem, the authors suggested creating a publicly available comparison of minimally invasive surgery rates among hospitals. "Now that this data is measurable and the evidence is clear, don't we have a moral obligation to make the data available to people?" the authors wrote, noting that physicians often seek minimally invasive surgeries for themselves.
The authors offered a few caveats: Hospitals should only be compared for a subset of operations for which minimally invasive surgery has been shown to be superior. Critical access hospitals, rural medical centers and other facilities with workforce issues should be exempt from the comparisons.