HOW MANY SPINE SURGERIES QUALIFY A SURGEON AS “EXPERIENCED”? (Orthopedics This Week)
A group of Boston researchers set out to determine volume benchmarks for the four commons lumbar spine surgeries—discectomy, decompression, lumbar interbody fusion, and lumbar posterolateral fusion.
The study,” Establishing benchmarks for the volume-outcome relationship for common lumbar spine surgical procedures,” is published in the January 2018 edition of The Spine Journal.
Co-author Andrew J. Schoenfeld, M.D., M.Sc., with the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School told OTW, “We are increasingly recognizing the importance of volume-outcomes relationships in various surgical disciplines.”
“To define these correctly, however, we must ensure that the measures used are not only valid but determined objectively. We are among the first to describe this relationship in an objective fashion for lumbar spine procedures.”
“As described in the text, we used a spline analysis which is an objective means of defining volume-outcome relationships based on the assessment of the relationship between surgical volume and complications as well as readmissions. We w...
