Association of overlapping surgery with outcomes

Editor's Note

In this multicenter study, overlapping surgery was not significantly associated with in-hospital mortality or postoperative complication rates, but it was significantly linked to increased surgery time.

Researchers from Stanford University, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, analyzed 66,430 procedures, of which 8,224 were overlapping.

Overlapping surgery was not significantly associated with differences in in-hospital mortality (1.9% vs 1.6%) or postoperative complications (12.8% vs 11.8%) but was significantly associated with increased surgery  length (204 vs 173 minutes).

A unique aspect of this study, which involved surgical procedures at eight high-volume medical centers, was that data included all of a surgeon’s cases during the study period, allowing for comparison of a surgeon’s overlapping and nonoverlapping cases of the same type, the authors note.