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Almost Left Behind - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine - April 2018

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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We have a long way to go, we're working on an infrastructure to be able to generate pre- dictive algorithms and do a better job of iden- tifying these subpopu- lations. Overall, we could be looking at hundreds or even thou- sands of variables, but it's likely that only a few dozen or less have major contributions to the outcomes we're measuring. We don't have to nail down every one, just the ones that really matter. Better guidance Our goal is to continue collecting data about demographics, about patients' goals and fears and emotional states as well as other patient and treatment factors that matter to outcomes that measure value for the entire care process. If we keep collecting data and use the appro- priate analytical tools, our algorithms will get better and better, even if we realize they'll never be perfect. You can do one thing to one subpopulation and have it benefit them, but that if you do the exact same thing to another subpopulation, it can contribute to harm. And doing the same thing to yet another sub- population might result in neither benefit nor harm, so it would sim- ply be wasteful. A P R I L 2 0 1 8 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 6 5 The same mesh and the same technique can produce dramatically different outcomes in different patients.

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