Health Grades, Inc., has just released its third annual report on bariatric surgeries performed at surgical facilities across the nation.  It seems top-rated hospitals perform more of this increasingly popular surgery and they do so with 65% fewer complications than their lower-rated and less busy counterparts.

HealthGrades is an industry leader in rating healthcare facilities and their personnel.  The organization’s ratings system is used and respected by hospitals, medical insurance providers, employers, and millions of Americans looking for quality and cost information.  The results of its just-released study, Bariatric Surgery Trends in American Hospitals, is available on the organization’s website.

The term, bariatric surgery, encompasses several different surgical procedures undertaken to lose weight when other measures fail to produce the desired results.  More than 250,000 such surgeries are performed every year, according to estimates issued by American Society for Bariatric Surgery, an increase of 1,431% in just the last decade alone.  Complications that are most often associated with this type of surgery include infection, kidney failure, stroke, and heart attack.

Between 2004 and 2006, the number of invasive gastric bypass surgeries has dropped by almost 82% while the number of less-invasive laparoscopic surgeries has grown by about 418%.  The gastric bypass surgeries saw the largest gain in the number of complications, increasing by 17% over the study period.

Bariatric surgeries are performed at 680 surgical facilities in 17 states.  The HealthGrades study included them all and awarded ratings stars according to performance.  The top-rated facilities earned 5 stars while facilities that performed as expected received 3 stars.  Those that were evaluated as poor performers received just one star.

Most of the country’s 154,451 bariatric surgeries are performed in just four states – California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.  The star ratings for the hospitals in these four states indicate that:

• 93 hospitals received 5 stars
• 263 received 3 stars
• 99 earned only 1 star

Some of the findings of the study include:

• Surgery at a 5-star facility comes with a decreased risk of surgery-related complications by as much as 65% when compared to 1-star facilities.  The decreased risk of surgery in a 5-star facility versus a 3-star facility was found to be 41%
• 5-star hospitals performed almost twice as many bariatric surgeries (an average of 526 surgeries per facility each year) as lower-rated hospitals.  Three-star facilities averaged 283 procedures and 1-star hospitals performed an average of 266 procedures each
• The facilities that performed the most surgeries saw the fewest complications.  Hospitals that performed 125 or more bariatric procedures a year were the least risky while those that did less than 25 were the sites of most complications
• If only 5-star hospitals had been used for bariatric surgeries from 2004 through the end of 2006, as many as 5,125 complications might have been avoided

Source: HealthGrades