Health IT, Hospitals

New calculator tool quantifies a patient’s risk for surgery complications

Some smart data crunching has led to the creation of a new calculator that surgeons […]

Some smart data crunching has led to the creation of a new calculator that surgeons and patients can use to assess a patient’s risk for surgery complications like an infection or heart failure.

As part of its National Surgical Quality Improvement Program, the American College of Surgeons has developed a surgical risk calculator it says is an important decision-support tool for doctors and patients to truly collaborate on making care decisions. The online calculator asks for 21 pieces of information about a patient, including age, gender, comorbidities and the procedure he’s thinking of having done.

Algorithms built into the tool go to work and deliver that patient’s risk for death, overall complications and eight specific outcomes: pneumonia, heart failure, surgical site infection, urinary tract infection, blood clot and kidney failure. They’ll also project an estimated length of hospital stay for the patient.

The team that built the calculator used three years’ worth of data derived from the NSQIP, covering outcomes from about 1.4 million procedures and more than 1,500 kinds of operations. A paper published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons details positive results in tests of the tool with 80 surgeons in 10 case scenarios.

ACS emphasizes the need for such a tool as payers increasingly refuse to reimburse providers for preventable complications, saying that CMS may soon provide financial incentives for surgeons to calculate the risk of operations with patients.

Regardless, though, using evidence to assess a patient’s risk could help doctors manage patients’ expectations, deliver patient-centered care and enable truly informed consent. Today, identifying patients at a high risk for complications is often based on generalities or anecdotal experiences.

ACS says a mobile version of the calculator is in the works.

Shares0
Shares0