Surgical Outcomes Big Data: What Can 100+ Million Hospitalizations Tell Us About the Quality and Value of Different Surgical Care in the US?
(11/25/2013) 9 minutes

description:

Healthcare quality is an important concern for our country today, with important economic implications. However, it is difficult to judge quality at the patient level, given the wide variation in patient health status on baseline. When bad outcomes occur, it is difficult to say if the outcomes are due to patients' baseline status ("they were too sick to be saved") or reflect a true provider competence and quality problem. Therefore, quality can best be judged at the population level with big data, when similar patients are compared together and tracked over time and across hospitals.

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