Saturday, November 2, 2013

A Vital Measure: Your Surgeon's Skill - NYTimes.com

To those of us in training, the hospital was cursed. At least when it came to a certain operation.

We dreaded being asked to scrub in at these operations because we knew we would be forced to hold patient parts until our fingers went numb and arms quivered. The surgeons hunted, stabbed and slashed their way through the procedure; and whenever their knife would go a little too far, or their knot would slip, or their stitch pull, we braced ourselves for their fury…and for the inevitable extra time it would take for them to correct their errors.

The patients, many of whom had come in to the hospital walking and talking, ended up lingering for weeks afterward with infections, open wounds and other complications.

But everything changed when a new surgeon came on board. Built like a rugby player, he shocked us first with his speed, and then his results. The once unbearable day-long slog became a morning's work; and instead of spending weeks in the hospital, his patients went home after eight days.

In the operating room, his bear paw hands turned delicate, teasing out tissues, caressing vessels and nimbly knotting thread as fine as human hair. There was not a single wasted movement; and each step blended seamlessly with the next, giving those of us who had the fortune to observe the sense that we were watching not surgery, but a well-choreographed ballet.

"It's like you're just standing there holding the needle or knife," said one friend who was lucky enough to assist the new surgeon, "and he's moving the body underneath you."

I remembered this surgeon — and the dramatic differences between his colleagues and him — when I read a study published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine on the relationship between a surgeon's operative technique and patient outcomes.

It has been clear for nearly 30 years that not all surgeons produce the same results. The reasons, however, have remained elusive. Most studies on surgical quality have focused on what surgeons do before and after surgery, practices that are easy to measure and analyze, like giving antibiotics to prevent surgical wound infections and administering blood thinners toguard against the development of blood clots.

But even with the most compulsive adherence to these pre- and post-operative protocols, and much to the chagrin of many a well-intentioned health care expert, payer and policy maker, significant disparities in patient outcomes after surgery have persisted.

The reason, observers have postulated, may be the one, obvious thing that most of these initiatives have scrupulously avoided: what goes on in the operating room.

Now an innovative collaboration between researchers, payers and weight-loss surgeons, the Michigan Bariatric Surgery Collaborative, has addressed that-which-could-not-be-named. And their findings have confirmed what patients have long suspected and trainees have long known – the dexterity of a surgeon's hands can account for much of the differences in how well patients do.

Researchers from the group asked a panel of surgeon-experts to review videotapes of operations performed by 20 unnamed surgeons who were part of the collaborative. They then asked the surgeon-experts to come up with a ranking based on the deftness with which operating instruments were used, the gentleness with which tissues were handled, the degree to which the surgeons were able to expose key areas, the time and amount of movement required to perform each step and the general flow of the operation. The researchers then confirmed that the rankings remained consistent by asking a different group of surgeon-experts to evaluate the videotapes.

To the researchers' surprise, there were huge variations in operative skill between the practicing surgeons, with the lowest ranked surgeons working at what the reviewers considered a level only slightly better than a trainee at the end of residency, and the highest-ranking surgeons working like "masters" in their field.

"You didn't have to be an expert to see the difference," said Dr. John D. Birkmeyer, a surgeon who is lead author of the study and director of the Center for Health Care Outcomes and Policy at the University of Michigan. (You can view video clips of a high- and low-ranked surgeon, below. Warning: graphic content.)

Dr. Birkmeyer and his co-authors then reviewed the records of the 20 surgeons' post-operative complications and compared them with their rankings. Not surprisingly, surgeons in the bottom quartile took 40 percent more time to complete the same operation and had higher mortality rates than top-ranked surgeons. But their patients also ran a significantly higher chance of developing a whole host of complications, including wound infections, pneumonia, bleeding and thrombophlebitis, and required re-operation and readmission to the hospital after discharge more often than patients of surgeons whose rankings were in the top quartile.

The study is the first to reliably measure operative skills in practicing surgeons and correlate those measurements with patient outcomes. "We now have a scientific way to evaluate a practicing surgeon's skill that is as reliable as about anything we measure in health care in terms of quality," Dr. Birkmeyer observed.

Being able to measure operative skill could change how patients and doctors approach surgery. Currently, patients have few direct ways to evaluate a potential surgeon and end up trying to divine the quality of operative technique by researching where the surgeon trained, tracking down board certification and hospital statistics or relying on word-of-mouth. Regulatory organizations, too, must base their licensing decisions on indirect information like a surgeon's training and performance on multiple choice tests and oral exams. These methods of appraisal, even with the best available approximations of operating room scenarios, can only offer indications of how a surgeon might actually perform in the operating room.

Even practicing surgeons, who have few opportunities after residency training to strengthen their operative techniques, may benefit from the research. Dr. Birkmeyer and his colleagues are currently studying how coaching from "master surgeons" might help other surgeons improve their rankings. "There may be some strategies for not just measuring a problem but ultimately fixing it."

But it's those practicing surgeons who may also be most resistant to such evaluations. "For surgeons, performance in the operating room is hugely personal," Dr. Birkmeyer noted. "Having it evaluated can be seen as highly threatening,"

Still, organizations like The Leapfrog Group, whose members include large employers trying to improve health care, are considering using similar methods to help patients identify safer hospitals for surgery. And Dr. Birkmeyer and his colleagues are extending their efforts to include studies looking at how operative technique might correlate with patient outcomes in prostate, colon and spine surgery. "It makes sense that some individuals might be naturally more talented at surgery, like some people are better at music or athletics," Dr. Birkmeyer said.

"But this isn't just about who is the better tennis player," he added. "People's lives are at stake."


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/a-vital-measure-your-surgeons-skill/?

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

TheNNT

Quick summaries of evidence-based medicine.

We are a group of physicians that have developed a framework and rating system to evaluate therapies based on their patient-important benefits and harms as well as a system to evaluate diagnostics by patient sign, symptom, lab test or study.

We only use the highest quality, evidence-based studies (frequently, but not always Cochrane Reviews), and we accept no outside funding or advertisements.

The Title Bar's background color immediately shows our rating for this intervention. The line below the title gives the most important data piece: frequently the greatest benefit or greatest harm, when available.

http://www.thennt.com/

Related:

http://www.uws.edu/Research/Number_Needed_to_Treat.pdf

http://www.patient.co.uk/doctor/numbers-needed-to-treat

Monday, October 28, 2013

MCAT | Khan Academy

This collection is being developed for the revised MCAT® exam that will first be administered in spring 2015. Videos will be added to the collection through fall 2014. All content in this collection has been created under the direction of the Khan Academy and has been reviewed under the direction of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). All materials are categorized according to the pre-health competencies tested by the MCAT exam; however, the content in this collection is not intended to prescribe a program of study for the MCAT exam.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/mcat

Sunday, October 27, 2013

'We've reached the end of antibiotics' | Mail Online

A high-ranking official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared in an interview with PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.

'For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?"' said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. 'Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period."'

The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance.

Srinivasan, who is also featured in a Frontline report called 'Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,' which aired Tuesday, said that both humans and livestock have been overmedicated to such a degree that bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics.

'We're in the post-antibiotic era,' he said. 'There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can't.'.

Dr Srinivasan offered an example of this notion, citing the recent case of three Tampa Bay Buccaneers players who made headlines after reportedly contracting potentially deadly MRSA infections, which until recently were largely restricted to hospitals.

About 10 years ago, however, the CDC official began seeing outbreaks of different kinds of MRSA infections in schools and gyms.

'In hospitals, when you see MRSA infections, you oftentimes see that in patients who have a catheter in their blood, and that creates an opportunity for MRSA to get into their bloodstream,' he said.

'In the community, it was causing a very different type of infection. It was causing a lot of very, very serious and painful infections of the skin, which was completely different from what we would see in health care.'

With bacteria constantly evolving and developing resistance to conventional antibiotics, doctors have been forced to 'reach back into the archives' and 'dust off' older, more dangerous cures like colistin.

'It's very toxic,' said Srinivasan. 'We don't like to use it. It damages the kidneys. But we're forced to use it in a lot of instances.'

The expert went on, saying that the discovery of antibiotics in 1928 by Professor Alexander Fleming revolutionized medicine, allowing doctors to treat hundreds of millions of people suffering from illnesses that had been considered terminal for centuries.

Antibiotics also paved the way for successful organ transplants, chemotherapy, stem cell and bone marrow transplantations - all the procedures that weaken the immune system and make the body susceptible to infections.

However, the CDC director explained that people have fueled the fire of bacterial resistance through rampant overuse and misuse of antibiotics.

'These drugs are miracle drugs, these antibiotics that we have, but we haven't taken good care of them over the 50 years that we've had them,' he told Frontline.

Srinivasan added that pharmaceutical companies are at least partially to blame for this problem, saying that they have neglected the development of new and more sophisticated antibiotics that could keep up with bacterial resistance because 'there's not much money to be made' in this field.