Trauma & Critical Care

Biography

Biography: Lynne Moore

Abstract

Statement of the Problem: In response to evidence of variation in patient outcomes across providers and growing financial pressures, healthcare authorities in high-income countries have emphasized the urgent need to develop tools to monitor quality of care.

Aim: Aim of this study is to develop Canadian benchmarks to monitor mortality and hospital length of stay (LOS) for injury admissions.

Method: Benchmarks were derived from data from the Canadian National Trauma Registry on patients with major trauma admitted to any level I or II trauma center in Canada and the following patient subgroups: isolated traumatic brain injury (TBI), isolated thoracoabdominal injury, multisystem blunt injury, aged ≥65 years. Predictive validity was assessed using measures of discrimination and calibration. Extensive sensitivity analyses were performed to assess the impact of replacing analytically complex methods (multiple imputation, shrinkage estimates and flexible modelling) with simple models that can be implemented locally.

Results: The mortality risk adjustment model had excellent discrimination and calibration (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve=0.883; Hosmer-Lemeshow=122). The LOS risk-adjustment model predicted 31% of the variation in LOS. Overall, observed-to-expected ratios of mortality and mean LOS generated by an analytically simple model were highly correlated to those generated by analytically complex models (r>0.95; kappa on outliers>0.90).

Conclusion & Significance: We propose Canadian benchmarks that can be used to monitor quality of care in Canadian trauma centers using a simple Excel program (provided) that can be implemented using local trauma registries. We observed significant variation in mortality and LOS across Canadian trauma centers indicating room for improvement in the quality of acute care for Canadian injury admissions.