New research calls into question the validity of using post-operative blood clot rates as a metric of hospital quality. According to a study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, rates of venous thromboembolism—a term that includes pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis—could be skewed by surveillance bias.
Such bias can occur in hospitals that have more expansive screening criteria for VTE, including the testing of asymptomatic patients, or in hospitals that rely more heavily on imaging for diagnosis, said the authors, who analyzed data from the CMS' Hospital Compare, the American Hospital Association and Medicare claims.