Objective: To determine the number of total thyroidectomies per surgeon per year
associated with the lowest risk of complications. Background: The surgeon volume–outcome …

PURPOSE Centralization is often proposed as a strategy to improve the quality of certain
high-risk health care services. We evaluated the extent to which existing hospital systems …

Importance In the United States, reports about perioperative complications associated with
bariatric surgery led to the establishment of accreditation criteria for bariatric centers of …

Background The Nuss procedure is the accepted standard approach to correct pectus
excavatum. Still, is associated with potential major complications that are in part believed to …

Surgeons are increasingly under pressure to measure and improve their quality. While there
is broad consensus that we ought to track surgical quality, there is far less agreement about …

Importance Increasing regionalization of cancer surgery has the inadvertent potential to lead
to fragmentation of care if readmissions occur at a facility other than the index hospital. The …

Abstract Background and Aims The current study proposes a novel volume–outcome (V–O)
meta-analytical approach to determine the optimal annual hospital case volume threshold …

Regionalizing high-risk surgery by restricting care to high-volume centers of excellence is a
qualityimprovement strategy with intuitive appeal. Decades of research have shown that the …

Background Optimal management of stage II/III gastric cancer requires multidisciplinary
care, often necessitating treatment at more than one facility. We aimed to determine patterns …

Objective To evaluate health care fragmentation in patients with stage II and III rectal
cancers. Background Fragmentation of care among multiple hospitals may worsen …