Over the past several decades rates of spine surgeries in the U.S. have increased dramatically. Spinal fusion surgery rates, in particular, have grown exponentially despite being one of the most costly, invasive, and controversial methods for treating patients suffering from back conditions. Furthermore, lumbar fusion surgeries continue to be performed at increasing rates despite a lack of scientific evidence and consensus that they are cost-effective and produce better clinical outcomes than less radical treatment of lower back pain. As a result, large amounts of healthcare dollars continue to be invested in these costly procedures which are potentially dangerous and have questionable efficacy in terms of improving patient outcomes. Importantly, there is a lack of population studies in the literature on spinal fusion surgeries from a health services research perspective. Therefore, the present research is a population based study using an administrative database and includes patients of all ages and payer types. The data used in the present study come from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) and include all hospitalizations in Florida in 2010. The objective of the study is to analyze the incidence of spinal fusion surgeries in Florida hospitals for patients of all ages and payer types by demographic variables to understand who gets these surgeries and for which conditions. The first null hypothesis is that there are no statistically significant predictors of the incidence of lumbar/lumbosacral, dorsal/dorsolumbar spinal fusion surgeries in Florida hospitals. Logistic regression was used to analyze the incidence of fusion surgeries. The binary dependent variable was coded as a "1" for all patients who were a case (i.e. they received one of the five procedure codes being studied in the present research) and a "0" for all patients who were controls (meaning they did not receive any of the five fusion procedure codes). Logistic regression was used to predict the probability of an observation being a "1" given the independent variables included in the model. Additionally, hospital charges were analyzed to understand the associated hospital charges with these surgeries. The second null hypothesis is that there are no statistically significant predictors of the charges of Lumbar/Lumbosacral, Dorsal/Dorsolumbar spinal fusion surgeries in Florida Hospitals. A mixed effects model was used to test this hypothesis and the fixed effects which were included in the model were gender, age, race, principal payer, and principal procedure. A mixed effects model was chosen due to the fact that cases who had surgeries performed at the same hospital are not independent and therefore the data were clustered on hospitals. A random intercept term was used to address this fact. SAS software was used to complete all of the analyses. In 2010, there were 16,236 Lumbar/Lumbosacral, Dorsal/Dorsolumbar fusion surgery cases in Florida hospitals that were included in the case population and 21,856 individuals included in the control population for a total of 38,092 included in the study population. An understanding of who is most likely to receive a fusion surgery, at what age, and for which diagnoses, as has been done here, is extremely important. This knowledge can help researchers, policy makers, and physicians alike. Comprehensive physician practice guidelines for performing fusion surgeries still do not exist in the year 2013; therefore, in order to have the greatest impact, the efforts for creating the guidelines should be focused on those individuals who are most likely to receive fusions as shown for the first time by the data analyzed here. Given the high incidence of these surgeries in Florida alone, the need for practice guidelines cannot be overstated. The total hospital charges in Florida hospitals for the 16,236 cases were $2,095,413,584. Despite having the same principal diagnoses and a similar number of additional diagnoses, patients who received a fusion surgery resulted in approximately three times the charges as those incurred by the controls. Overall, the high incidence and charges for fusion surgeries shown in this study emphasize the importance of having a better understanding of when these surgeries are justified and for which patients. Without comprehensive practice guidelines established through evidence-based research this is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. The diagnoses which are most prevalent and show the most inconsistencies between cases may be a good starting point for such guidelines.

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Évaluer la sécurité des patients hospitalisés constitue un enjeu majeur de la gestion des risques pour les services de santé. Le développement d’indicateurs destinés à mesurer les événements indésirables liés aux soins (EIS) est une étape cruciale dont le défi principal repose sur la performance des données utilisées. Le développement d’indicateurs de la sécurité des patients – les Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) – par l’Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) aux Etats Unis, utilisant des codes de la 9ème révision (cliniquement modifiée) de la Classification Internationale des Maladies (CIM) présente des perspectives intéressantes. Nos travaux ont abordé cinq questions fondamentales liées au développement de ces indicateurs : la définition du cadre nosologique, la faisabilité de calcul des algorithmes et leur validité, la qualité des données pour coder les diagnostics médicaux à partir de la CIM et leur performance pour comparer plusieurs pays, et la possibilité d’établir une valeur de référence pour comparer ces indicateurs. Certaines questions demeurent cependant et nous proposons des pistes de recherche pour améliorer les PSIs : une meilleure définition des algorithmes et l’utilisation d’autres sources de données pour les valider (i.e., données de registre), ainsi que l’utilisation de modèles d’ajustement utilisant l’index de Charlson, le nombre moyen de diagnostics codés et une variable de la valeur prédictive positive, afin de contrôler les variations du case-mix et les différences de qualité du codage entre hôpitaux et pays. / Assessing safety among hospitalized patients is a major issue for health services. The development of indicators to measure adverse events related to health care (HAE) is a crucial step, for which the main challenge lies on the performance of the data used for this approach. Based on the limitations of the measurement in terms of reproducibility and on the high cost of studies conducted using medical records audit, the development of Patient Safety Indicators (PSI) by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the United States, using codes from the clinically modified 9th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) shows interesting prospects. Our work addressed five key issues related to the development of these indicators: nosological definition; feasibility and validity of codes based algorithms; quality of medical diagnoses coding using ICD codes, comparability across countries; and possibility of establishing a benchmark to compare these indicators. Some questions remain, and we suggest several research pathways regarding possible improvements of PSI based on a better definition of PSI algorithms and the use of other data sources to validate PSI (i.e., registry data). Thus, the use of adjustment models including the Charlson index, the average number of diagnoses coded and a variable of the positive predictive value should be considered to control the case-mix variations and differences of quality of coding for comparisons between hospitals or countries.