Systematic review of hospital-wide complication registries

Creating an inexpensive hospital-wide surgical complication register for performance monitoring: a cohort study

Objectives

Basic tools that measure a hospital’s performance are required in order to benchmark or compare hospitals, but multispecialty institutional registries are rarely reported, and there is no consensus on their standard definitions and methodology. This study aimed to describe the setting up and first results of a hospital-wide surgical complication register that uses a minimal set of patient-related risk factors based on bedside data and produces outcomes data based on severity of complications.

Design

Cohort study.

Setting

Perioperative data related to all adult surgical procedures in a tertiary referral centre in Finland for 3 years (2016–2018) were included in the study. Complications were recorded according to a modified Clavien-Dindo classification, and the preoperative risk factors were compiled based on the literature and coded as numerical measures. The associations of preoperative risk factors with postoperative complications were analysed using the χ2 test or Fisher’s exact test.

Results

In total, 19 158 operations were performed between 2016 and 2018. Data on complications (Clavien 0–9) were recorded for 4529 surgical patients (23.6%), and 779 complications were reported (Clavien 1–9), leading to an overall complication rate of 17.2%. Of these, 4.6% were graded as major (Clavien 4–7). Patient-related risk factors with the strongest association with complications were growing American Society of Anesthesiologists Physical Status Classification System score (p<0.001), growing Charlson Index (p<0.001), poor nutritional status (Nutritional Risk Screening 2002), p=0.041) and urgency of surgery (p<0.001).

Conclusions

We describe an inexpensive hospital-wide surgical complication monitoring system that can produce valid numerical data for monitoring risk-adjusted surgical quality. The results showed that only a few patient-related risk factors were sufficient to account for the case mix.

Reliability of patient-reported complications following hip or knee arthroplasty procedures

BACKGROUND

Patient reported outcomes are increasingly used to assess the success of surgical procedures. Patient reported complications are often included as an outcome. However, these data must be validated to be accurate and useful in clinical practice.

METHODS

This was a retrospective descriptive study of 364 patients who had completed their six-month follow-up review questionnaire in the Arthroplasty Clinical Outcomes Registry, National (ACORN), an Australian orthopaedic registry. Patient-reported complications following total hip arthroplasty (THA) and total knee arthroplasty (TKA) were compared to surgeon-reported complications recorded in their electronic medical records at their various follow-up appointments. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value were calculated. Agreement was assessed using percentage agreement and Cohen's kappa.

RESULTS

Patient-reported data from the ACORN registry returned overall low sensitivity (0.14), negative predictive value (0.13) and kappa values (0.11), but very high specificity (0.98), positive predictive value (0.98) and agreement values (96.3%) for reporting of complications when compared to surgeon-reported data. Values varied depending on the type and category of complication.

CONCLUSION

Patients are accurate in reporting the absence of complications, but not the presence. Sensitivity of patient-reported complications needs to be improved. Greater attention to the clarity of the questions asked may help in this respect.