Editor's Note The Surgical Apgar Score (SAS) was found to be significantly predictive but weakly discriminative for major complications and death after emergency high-risk abdominal surgery in this study. The risk of major complications, death, and ICU admission increased significantly with decreasing SAS (P < .001). The score’s c-statistics were…

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Editor's Note Surgical residents who perceived negative effects of The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s duty hour policies on patient safety were more likely to violate duty hour policies, this study finds. Of 4,554 residents in 184 programs analyzed: 25.3% felt the current duty hour policies negatively affected patient…

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Editor's Note Patients who were readmitted to a nonindex hospital after having emergency general surgery were significantly more likely to have had their index surgery at a large, teaching, safety-net hospital, this study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, finds. Readmission to a nonindex hospital was independently associated with mortality…

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Editor's Note Patients who have a laparoscopic appendectomy can go home the same day of surgery with similar outcomes to patients who spent a night in the hospital, this study finds. In this analysis of 12,703 patients, those who were discharged the same day of surgery had an overall readmission…

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Editor's Note Total hip outcomes such as pain, function, range of motion, and strength are different for men and women, which could lead to gender-specific rehabilitation programs, finds this study presented November 9 at the 2016 ACR/ARHP [American College of Rheumatology/Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals] Annual Meeting. Researchers from the…

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Ambulatory surgery center (ASC) quality scores became public for the first time in 2016. ASCs and regulators including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) say they are pleased to have documentation of their track records. But what do the scores really mean, and how useful, exactly, are they…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on November 7 released its 2016 Annual Report: “America’s Hospitals: Improving Quality and Safety.” The report, which includes information on how more than 3,300 accredited hospitals performed on measures of patient care in 2015, showed that hospital performance continued to improve, greatly enhancing quality of…

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Editor's Note For older hip fracture patients, the care they received at a postacute care facility had a three to eight times greater impact on their long-term recovery than the care they received at the hospital, this study finds. Nursing home factors explained three times more variation in the odds…

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Editor's Note The first national quality improvement (QI) program for bariatric surgery reduced readmissions by more than 30% for some hospitals, finds this study presented November 2 at ObesityWeek 2016, the annual conference of the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS). The average hospital saw 30-day readmissions drop…

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Editor's Note More than 1,600 hospitals will get Medicare bonuses in 2017 under the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program, which is about 200 fewer than last year, the November 2 Modern Healthcare reports. The results are concerning because fewer hospitals are getting bonuses and hospitals aren’t moving in the rankings,…

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