This study states that Operative volume has been used as a marker of quality. Research from previous decades has suggested minimum open abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair volume requirements for surgeons of 9 to 13 open AAA repairs annually and for hospitals of 18 open AAA repairs annually to purportedly achieve acceptable results. Given concerns regarding the decreased frequency of open repairs in the endovascular era, we examined the association of surgeon and hospital volume with the 30- and 90-day mortality in the Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) registry.
Patients who had undergone elective open AAA repair from 2013 to 2018 were identified in the VQI registry. We performed a cross-sectional evaluation of the association between the average hospital and surgeon volume and 30-day postoperative mortality using a hierarchical Bayesian model. Cross-level interactions were permitted, and random surgeon- and hospital-level intercepts were used to account for clustering. The mortality results were adjusted by standardizing to the observed distribution of relevant covariates in the overall cohort. The outcomes were compared to the Society for Vascular Surgery guidelines recommended criteria of <5% perioperative mortality.
Reference link- https://www.jvascsurg.org/article/S0741-5214(20)31911-X/fulltext
