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Statistical Modeling of Mortality Risk for Congenital Heart Defects
Keywords
curvature function, historic data of pediatric cardiac care consortium, mortality risk analysis, optimal surgical volume
Abstract
This paper, retrieving surgical data recorded in the Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium between 1985-2004, identifies an inverse relationship between in-hospital mortality and pediatric cardiac surgical volume in small and medium-sized centers. Similar inverse relationship was found for both low and high complexity cases after stratifying the data by risk category using the Risk Adjustment for Congenital Heart Surgery (RACHS). Given the relationship, a threshold on the volume to reach the lowest attainment of surgical mortality is suggested when is attainable.