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Studies that showed an association between higher hospital volume and lower operative mortality spurred efforts during the past decade to localize certain procedures to high-volume hospitals and to institute minimum-volume standards to ensure quality. Whether referral patterns have changed as a result and, consequently, whether operative mortality has decreased, is unclear.
To characterize temporal trends in use of high-volume hospitals for particular high-risk surgeries, investigators examined Medicare data from 1999 to 2008 for hospitalizations that involved procedures targeted for volume-based referral (esophagectomy, pancreatectomy, lung resection, cystectomy, abdominal aortic aneurysm [AAA] repair, coronary artery bypass grafting [CABG]…