TUESDAY, July 27 (HealthDay News) -- Hospitals, and to a lesser extent surgeons, who have a low volume of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgeries tend to incur higher costs, according to research published in the July 26 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Andrew D. Auerbach, M.D., of the University of California in San Francisco, and colleagues conducted an observational study of adult patients undergoing CABG surgery in a network of hospitals in the United States. The purpose of the study was to assess the quality of care delivered to these patients and to assess the relationship of case volume and quality with the length of hospital stay or hospital costs.

The researchers found that only 18 percent of individual patients received all indicated quality-of-care measures; these patients had a shorter length of stay as well as lower hospital costs. Individual quality indicators had inconsistent relationships with hospital costs and length of stay. Hospitals with the lowest volume of coronary bypass surgery had hospital costs 19.8 percent higher than the median, and quality of care did not impact this; surgeons with the lowest surgical volume had hospital costs 3.1 percent above the median.

"Outcomes should be measured beyond the in-hospital or immediate post-discharge period, should be risk adjusted, and should be weighted according to relevance to patients and integrated into a global quality score. Data submission should be mandatory for any hospital receiving federal (Medicare) funds as reimbursement for performing CABG surgery," writes the author of an accompanying editorial.

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