Current medical research and literature may be overemphasizing the role that hospital volume plays in patient outcomes, according to a study by researchers at Rice University.
Hundreds of studies published in medical journals have concluded that hospitals that perform higher numbers of complex operations have lower patient-mortality rates. This volume-outcome relation has been identified for a wide variety of procedures, including open-heart surgery, hip replacement and many cancer operations. In a new study, Rice researchers noted that many previous studies used the simplest statistical models to measure the volume-outcome relationship.
