Mapping variations in surgery
"No agreed best method exists."
For many surgical procedures this is the case. Most surgical interventions are based on transfer of historical, experience-based knowledge. In medicine, it is estimated that 50% of interventions is evidence-based. But in surgery this percentage may be as low as 30%. The remaining percentage is based on experience, or a mix of experience and evidence.
At Incision we believe that standardization of surgery is the key to improve the quality of surgical care. To support the development of evidence-based standardization more data about all variations and outcomes is necessary. The power of professionals around the globe can unlock this knowledge. Our ambition is to make Incision a platform where surgical professionals can exchange their expertise.
So, we have started our work on the next phase of our development. Over the past few years we have created over 350 ‘base’ Courses of surgical procedures, all using our standardized step-by-step methodology. The next step is now to go deeper in the content per procedure, and to start mapping the variations that are being used across the world.
What drives variations in surgery? We believe that they are caused by one of the following factors: (i) Patient characteristics, (ii) Anatomical variations, (iii) Disease variation in organ, (iv) Risk preference of patients, and (v) Local preferences of surgeons & teams. By applying these factors we believe that we should be able to identify and map how surgery is done differently by surgeons and their teams.
In the coming months we will be working with a number of leading European surgeons to apply our approach. We will start with a small set of procedures and work with many surgical teams in Europe to gather the required inputs.
If you would like to be involved in our effort, you are more then welcome! Please drop us a line via [email protected]. We look forward to cooperating with you.
And stay tuned, we will share some of our progress via the Incision blogs and posts!