ORLANDO – according to a study presented at the annual scientific assembly of the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma.
As payment models shift toward bundled care, providers will be more closely evaluated on their postoperative outcomes, which can vary based on the difficulty of surgery, even for relatively common procedures.
“Gallbladder disease affects roughly 20 million people annually in the United States, with laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most common operations performed by the typical surgeon,” said presenter Tarik Madni, MD, of the department of surgery, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. “However not all cholecystectomies are created equal; increased inflammation can lead to increased operative times, increased conversion rates, as well as increased risk of complications.”
Given the increased scrutiny of surgical procedures, the current application of modifier 22, which allows surgeons to receive greater reimbursement for a more difficult surgery, is not enough, according to Dr. Madni.
To address this shortfall, investigators developed the Parkland grading scale, a five-tiered grading system that is designed to be easy to remember, limited in the number of grades, and correlated with clinical outcomes.
To determine the grades of the scale, Dr. Madni and his fellow investigators used 200 gallbladder images collected immediately before dissection and analyzed anatomy and inflammatory characteristics.
Gallbladders with a grade 1 would be relatively normal looking, while a grade 5 gallbladder would show perforation, necrosis, or not be clearly visible because of adhesions, according to Dr. Madni.
Between September 2016 and March 2017, investigators asked 11 acute care surgeons to prospectively grade gallbladders they saw before surgery using the Parkland scale and to fill out a questionnaire describing the difficulty of the procedure afterwards.
Of 667 gallbladders graded, 60 were assessed to be grade 1 (19%), 90 were grade 2 (28%), 102 were grade 3 (32%), 28 were grade 4 (9%), and 37 were grade 5 (12%) on the Parkland scale.
Grade 1 gallbladders had a mean procedure difficulty score of 1.43, while grade 5 gallbladders had a mean difficulty of 4.46. Grade 1 gallbladders also corresponded with the shortest mean surgery time of 63.31 minutes, compared with an average of 108.13 minutes for grade 5.
Acute cholecystitis diagnosis also increased by Parkland grade, from 36.7% in grade 1 gallbladders to 83.8% in grade 5 (P less than .0001), as did open conversion rates, from 0% to 21.6% (P less than .0001).
Mean length of stay rose fivefold between grade 1 and grade 5 procedures, from around 8 hours to 36 hours, respectively (P less than .0001).
Discussant Martin Zielinski, MD, FACS, director of medical trauma clinical research at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., recognized the importance of having a grading scale but was curious why investigators did not analyze the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma’s (AAST) Emergency General Surgery anatomic grading scale, which is already in place.
“The AAST is a uniform, anatomic grading scale to measure the severity of diseases from the 16 most common [Emergency General Surgery] diseases,” Dr. Madni responded. “Unlike our operative-only finding scale, the AAST scale gives grades 1 through 5 definitions for four categories in each disease, not just operative, but clinical, imaging, operative, and pathologic categories.”
Comparatively, the Parkland scale is less cumbersome and covers a wider range of difficulty variation, according to Dr. Madni.
In the future, Dr. Madni and his colleagues will work to compare the Parkland scale to the AAST scale and look for ways to bridge the two.
Dr. Madni reported no relevant financial disclosures.
ezimmerman@frontlinemedcom.com
SOURCE: Madni T et al. EAST Scientific Assembly 2018 abstract #11.