Provider Factors Associated with Intramedullary Nail Use for Intertrochanteric Hip Fractures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Intramedullary nails provide no clear outcomes benefit in the majority of patients with intertrochanteric hip fracture, yet their use in the United States continues to increase. Non-patient factors that are associated with intramedullary nail use among Medicare patients have not been examined. The goal of this study was to identify the surgeon and hospital characteristics that were associated with the use of intramedullary nails compared with plate-and-screw devices among elderly Medicare patients with intertrochanteric hip fractures. METHODS: Medicare beneficiaries who were sixty-five years of age or older and underwent inpatient surgery to treat an intertrochanteric femoral fracture with use of an intramedullary nail or a plate-and-screw device were identified from the United States Medicare files for 2000 to 2002. Surgeon and hospital characteristics from the Medicare provider enrollment files were merged with the claims. Generalized linear mixed models with fixed and random effects modeled the association between surgeon and hospital factors and intramedullary nail use (compared with plate and screws), controlling for patient age, sex, and race; subtrochanteric fracture; Charlson comorbidity score; nursing home residence; and Medicaid-administered assistance. The adjusted odds ratios of receiving an intramedullary nail by year, surgeon, and hospital factors are reported. RESULTS: There were 192,365 claims for surgery to treat an intertrochanteric hip fracture that met the inclusion criteria and matched with surgeon and hospital information. There were 15,091 surgeons who performed intertrochanteric hip fracture surgeries in Medicare patients in 3480 hospitals between March 1, 2000, and December 31, 2002. The surgeon factors associated with intramedullary nail use include younger surgeon age (less than forty-five years old), an osteopathy degree, and operating at more than one hospital. The hospital factors associated with intramedullary nail use include a higher volume of intertrochanteric hip fracture surgeries, teaching hospital status, and having resident assistance during surgery. Surgeon factors improved the model fit more than hospital factors. CONCLUSIONS: The use of intramedullary nails was strongly associated with early-career surgeons and surgeon training programs. Our findings suggest that orthopaedic faculty at teaching hospitals and younger surgeons may be selecting orthopaedic implants on the basis of factors other than clinical outcomes evidence. We expect that intramedullary nail use will continue to increase as long as new surgeons are preferentially trained in intramedullary nailing procedures and surgeon reimbursement remains insulated from the treating hospital's burden of their choices for higher cost devices under the Medicare payment system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".