Factors influencing therapeutic strategy for patients with basal ganglia hemorrhage--could age play a potential role in final treatment decision?

BACKGROUND: Hypertension-associated intracerebral hemorrhage, when compared with cerebral infarction and subarachnoid hemorrhage, is associated with worse clinical outcomes or major disability. Worse clinical outcomes have been observed in the elderly population though age as a factor influencing physicians' final treatment decision is not well determined. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We studied 199 patients diagnosed with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICD code: ICD-9-CM-431) who visited a tertiary medical center from January 2003 to March 2006. Baseline characteristics, major medical histories (including co-morbidities), vital signs, neurological assessment (evaluated by the Glasgow Coma Scale), location of the hemorrhage, and the amount of hemorrhaging were all included as variables. A multivariate logistic regression model was chosen to evaluate the significant independent factors that could influence the physician's choice of treatment approach. RESULTS: There were totally 110 patients meeting the inclusion criteria for enrollment. We observed that worse neurological function on-arrival (chi2 = 8.57, p = .01) and larger amount of bleeding (chi2 = 9.29, p = .01) were more likely to receive surgery. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that age, neurological function on-arrival, and the amount of hemorrhage were significant independent factors influencing the physicians' treatment decision (all p < .05). CONCLUSION: Age, after adjustment for clinical variables representative of clinical severity, was an important factor in the final therapeutic decision. Our data suggest that a comprehensive evaluation of the patients' on-arrival status may be made and that advanced age should not be a determining factor in the choice of final treatment methods.

Statistical process control as a tool for controlling operating room performance: retrospective analysis and benchmarking.

BACKGROUND: There is much research using statistical process control (SPC) to monitor surgical performance, including comparisons among groups to detect small process shifts, but few of these studies have included a stabilization process. This study aimed to analyse the performance of surgeons in operating room (OR) and set a benchmark by SPC after stabilized process. METHODS: The OR profile of 499 patients who underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy performed by 16 surgeons at a tertiary hospital in Taiwan during 2005 and 2006 were recorded. SPC was applied to analyse operative and non-operative times using the following five steps: first, the times were divided into two segments; second, they were normalized; third, they were evaluated as individual processes; fourth, the ARL(0) was calculated;, and fifth, the different groups (surgeons) were compared. Outliers were excluded to ensure stability for each group and to facilitate inter-group comparison. RESULTS: The results showed that in the stabilized process, only one surgeon exhibited a significantly shorter total process time (including operative time and non-operative time). CONCLUSION: In this study, we use five steps to demonstrate how to control surgical and non-surgical time in phase I. There are some measures that can be taken to prevent skew and instability in the process. Also, using SPC, one surgeon can be shown to be a real benchmark.