JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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Postoperative venous thromboembolism (VTE) rates are widely reported quality metrics soon to be used in pay-for-performance programs. Surveillance bias occurs when some clinicians use imaging studies to detect VTE more frequently than other clinicians. Because they look more, they find more VTE events, paradoxically worsening their hospital's VTE quality measure performance. A surveillance bias may influence VTE measurement if (1) greater hospital VTE prophylaxis adherence fails to result in lower measured VTE rates, (2) hospitals with characteristics suggestive of higher quality (eg, more accreditations) have greater VTE prophylaxis adherence rates but worse VTE event rates, and (3) higher hospital VTE imaging utilization use rates are associated with higher measured VTE event rates. ⋯ Hospitals with higher quality scores had higher VTE prophylaxis rates but worse risk-adjusted VTE rates. Increased hospital VTE event rates were associated with increasing hospital VTE imaging use rates. Surveillance bias limits the usefulness of the VTE quality measure for hospitals working to improve quality and patients seeking to identify a high-quality hospital.
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Aortic stenosis is the most common form of valvular heart disease. Progression of aortic stenosis is very slow and highly variable. Decisions about when to perform valve surgery are made by subjective assessment of patient symptoms and objective measures of the valve and ventricular function by transthoracic echocardiography. ⋯ Asymptomatic patients with severe aortic stenosis require frequent monitoring of their subjective symptoms combined with objective measurement of aortic valve gradient and ventricular function by transthoracic echocardiography. Although conventional surgical replacement remains the mainstay of therapy for aortic stenosis, transcutaneous aortic valve implantation options are evolving.
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Sentinel lymph node (SLN) surgery provides reliable nodal staging information with less morbidity than axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) for patients with clinically node-negative (cN0) breast cancer. The application of SLN surgery for staging the axilla following chemotherapy for women who initially had node-positive cN1 breast cancer is unclear because of high false-negative results reported in previous studies. ⋯ Among women with cN1 breast cancer receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy who had 2 or more SLNs examined, the FNR was not found to be 10% or less. Given this FNR threshold, changes in approach and patient selection that result in greater sensitivity would be necessary to support the use of SLN surgery as an alternative to ALND.