Association of hospital and surgeon procedure volume with patient‐centered outcomes of total knee replacement in a population‐based cohort of patients age 65 years and older
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To study the association between procedure volume and patient-centered outcomes such as functional status. METHODS: We performed an observational study of a stratified random sample of Medicare beneficiaries who underwent primary total knee replacement (TKR) in 2000. Low-volume surgeons were defined as surgeons performing < or =6 TKRs per year in the Medicare population, and low-volume centers were defined as those in which < or =25 TKRs per year were performed. The primary outcome was the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) functional status score (0-100 scale; 100 = best) 2 years after TKR. We defined a WOMAC functional status score of <60 as a poor functional outcome. Analyses were adjusted for sociodemographic factors, preoperative functional status, and comorbidities. RESULTS: Fifty-eight percent of 1,597 eligible patients agreed to participate. Twelve percent of participating patients had a WOMAC score <60 2 years following TKR. Patients operated upon by low-volume surgeons in low-volume hospitals were twice as likely to have a poor WOMAC functional status score as patients operated upon by higher volume surgeons and in higher volume hospitals (odds ratio 2.1, 95% confidence interval 1.1-4.2). CONCLUSION: Patients operated upon in low-volume hospitals by low-volume surgeons had worse functional outcomes 2 years after TKR. These findings add a new and important dimension to the discussion of whether to promote selective referral of procedures such as TKR to high-volume centers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".