BACKGROUND-There were numerous efforts in the United States during the previous decade to concentrate selected surgical procedures in high-volume hospitals. It remains unknown whether referral patterns for high-risk surgery have changed as a result and how operative mortality has been affected.
Reliability adjustment reduces variation due to statistical noise and results in more accurate estimates of risk-adjusted hospital outcomes. Given the risk of misclassifying hospitals and surgeons using standard approaches, this technique should be considered when reporting surgical outcomes.
For early-stage HCC, racial/ethnic disparities in survival between minority and white patients are notable. After accounting for differences in stage, use of invasive therapy, and treatment benefit, no racial/ethnic survival disparity is evident between Hispanics and whites, but blacks have persistently poor survival.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.