United States: A study by the Lown Institute found that hospitals did more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries over three years. These surgeries put patients at risk and cost Medicare about USD 2 billion. The study also showed that some hospitals did far more unnecessary surgeries than others, with some doing none and others doing over half of their procedures unnecessarily.
Reader can use the analysis to alert the community of specific hospitals that particularly frequently overuse services and educate patients on why they should avoid going for back surgery in the first place.
How this was done
As reported by the Healthjournalism.org, researchers used Medicare claims data to assess three interventions that are commonly performed in patients for whom there is little or no evidence of a clinical benefit:
Spinal fusion — the process of connecting two or more vertebrae.
Laminectomy — partial removal of the lamina, thin, bony plates that form roof of the spinal canal and houses the spinal cord and its branches.
A Vertebroplasty — the injection of bone cement into the diseased vertebra.
Recently, most cases of back pain are chronic and have not been associated with any particular cause. Based on this data, patients suffering from this condition seem to benefit very little if at all from spinal fusion and laminectomy that are often carried out combined.
Both published and sham-controlled trials have indicated that vertebroplasty offers no or minimal value for patients with spinal fractures resulting from osteoporosis.
Procedures were not considered overused if the patient had a specific diagnosis to receive surgery such as spinal scoliosis to undergo spinal fusion/laminectomy and patient with bone cancer to receive vertebroplasty.
Findings
The assessment by the Lown Institute show that the average overuse was settled at 14% for spinal fusion and laminectomy, according to the rates set by individual hospitals hovering between 1% and 63%. The average overuse rate for vertebroplasty was 11% with overuse ranging between 0- 55.5.
Scientists also looked into how biased funding influenced the probability of performing avoidable surgeries. The 3,454 physicians who performed unnecessary procedures earned a total of USD 64 million in payments from device and drug makers, based on a new analysis of Open Payments data by Conflixis, an artificial intelligence company that investigates conflicts of interest in healthcare.