Does Hospital Operative Volume Influence the Outcomes of Patients After Heated Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy for Peritoneal Carcinomatosis?
2024Annals of surgical oncology
Chatani PD, Manzella A, Gribkova YY, Ecker BL, Beninato T +3 more
Plain English
Researchers looked at whether hospitals that perform more of a specific cancer surgery (called CRS/HIPEC, which involves removing tumors and bathing the abdomen with heated chemotherapy) get better results than hospitals that do fewer of these operations. They examined over 5,000 procedures across 149 hospitals between 2020 and 2022.
They found no meaningful difference in patient outcomes—including complications, deaths, hospital stays, or readmissions—regardless of whether a hospital performed 4 cases a year or 47 cases a year. The only minor difference was that low-volume hospitals sent more patients to the ICU after surgery, but this didn't translate to worse overall results.
This matters because it shows that for this particular procedure, hospitals don't need to do hundreds of these surgeries to get good results—experience at a basic level is apparently enough, at least in well-equipped academic medical centers.