title: Time under: hospital and patient characteristics affecting anesthesia duration.
abstract: One aspect of the quality of surgical care is the length of the time patients spend in the operating room and under anesthesia. It is generally believed that the longer a surgical procedure, the greater the chance of a complication. But because obtaining procedure and anesthesia times usually involves a direct review of medical records, few large-scale studies are able to examine procedure times. This Issue Brief summarizes new work that validates the use of Medicare billing data as a proxy for anesthesia times, and illustrates how these data can shed light on hospital and patient characteristics that affect procedure duration and surgical quality.
authors: Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, The University of Pennsylvania, and Center for Outcomes Research, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
authors: Jeffrey H
authors: JH
authors: Silber
mesh_terms: D000758:Anesthesia; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income; D007345:Insurance Claim Review; D006278:Medicare; D044469:Racial Groups; D012923:Social Class; D013514:Surgical Procedures, Operative; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States