Researchers from Penn Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia compared 30-day postoperative outcomes and costs from 340 teaching and 2,444 nonteaching hospitals, studying data from more than 350,000 Medicare beneficiaries who underwent general, vascular or orthopedic surgeries.
Here are some key takeaways from the study:
1. General surgery patients with the highest mortality risk had a 30-day mortality rate of 15.9 percent at teaching hospitals, compared to 18.2 percent at nonteaching hospitals.
2. Teaching hospitals spent $3,773 more per high-risk general surgery patient than nonteaching hospitals.
3. The mortality rate for high-risk vascular surgery was 15.5 percent at teaching hospitals and 16.4 percent at nonteaching hospitals.
4. Though orthopedic costs were higher at teaching hospitals, mortality rates did not vary significantly among the two settings.
“We found that as a patient’s severity of medical conditions and complexity of surgery increased, so, too, did the benefit of undergoing general or vascular surgery at a teaching hospital,” Lee A. Fleisher, MD, senior author of the study, chair of anesthesiology and critical care and the Robert Dunning Dripps Professor of anesthesiology at Philadelphia-based University of Pennsylvania Health System, said in a news release.
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