• Farhood Farjah, Leah Backhus, Aaron Cheng, Brian Englum, Sunghee Kim, Paramita Saha-Chaudhuri, Douglas E Wood, Michael S Mulligan, and Thomas K Varghese.
• Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash; Surgical Outcomes Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash. Electronic address: ffarjah@uw.edu.
• J. Thorac. Cardiovasc. Surg. 2015 May 1; 149 (5): 1365-71; discussion 1371-3.e3.

ObjectiveFailure to rescue is defined as death after an acute inpatient event and has been observed among hospitals that perform general, vascular, and cardiac surgery. This study aims to evaluate variation in complication and failure to rescue rates among hospitals that perform pulmonary resection for lung cancer.MethodsBy using the Society of Thoracic Surgeons General Thoracic Surgery Database, a retrospective, multicenter cohort study was performed of adult patients with lung cancer who underwent pulmonary resection. Hospitals participating in the Society of Thoracic Surgeons General Thoracic Surgery Database were ranked by their risk-adjusted, standardized mortality ratio (using random effects logistic regression) and grouped into quintiles. Complication and failure to rescue rates were evaluated across 5 groups (very low, low, medium, high, and very high mortality hospitals).ResultsBetween 2009 and 2012, there were 30,000 patients cared for at 208 institutions participating in the Society of Thoracic Surgeons General Thoracic Surgery Database (median age, 68 years; 53% were women, 87% were white, 71% underwent lobectomy, 65% had stage I). Mortality rates varied over 4-fold across hospitals (3.2% vs 0.7%). Complication rates occurred more frequently at hospitals with higher mortality (42% vs 34%, P < .001). However, the magnitude of variation (22%) in complication rates dwarfed the 4-fold magnitude of variation in failure to rescue rates (6.8% vs 1.7%, P < .001) across hospitals.ConclusionsVariation in hospital mortality seems to be more strongly related to rescuing patients from complications than to the occurrence of complications. This observation is significant because it redirects quality improvement and health policy initiatives to more closely examine and support system-level changes in care delivery that facilitate early detection and treatment of complications.Copyright © 2015 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery. All rights reserved.

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