Anesthesiology
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Multicenter Study
What sample sizes are required for pooling surgical case durations among facilities to decrease the incidence of procedures with little historical data?
Better predictions of each case's duration would reduce operating room labor costs and patient waiting times. A barrier to using historical case duration data to predict the duration of future cases is the absence for some cases of previous data for the same scheduled procedure from the same facility. The authors examined sample size requirements for pooling case duration data from several facilities to create a 90% chance of having case duration data for almost all procedures. ⋯ The lack of historical case duration data for scheduled procedures is an important cause of inaccuracy in predicting case durations. However, millions of cases probably would be required to provide historical case duration data for almost all procedures.