All you stats geeks out there will love the January 6, 2016 study in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery by Schilling and Bozic. We at OrthoBuzz are going to skip the gory statistical details for the most part and focus on the essential findings.
First the premise and purpose of the study: Because measuring and improving health care outcomes are nowadays top priorities, risk adjustment—methods to account for differences in patient characteristics across providers—has become a contentious issue. General risk-assessment models tend not to be well-tailored to orthopaedic procedures. So Schilling and Bozic developed a series of risk-adjustment models specific to 30-day morbidity and mortality following hip fracture repair (HFR), total hip arthroplasty (THA), and total knee arthroplasty (TKA).
