What is risk stratification?
Patients having an operation may do well or badly. Knowing the percentage that do badly or die can tell us if a particular hospital or doctor is any good at doing the operation. For example, if we hear that in St Mungo Hospital, 2% of patients having coronary bypass surgery die, whereas in St Hilda, the figure is 5%, we might (quite reasonably) conclude that St Mungo is better than St Hilda. But (and it is a big “but”), this assumes that the two hospitals treat similar patients. Say St Mungo operates only on fit young people with no other illnesses, and St Hilda takes all the sick, the old, the emergencies and all the patients turned down by St Mungo, then it is quite possible that St Hilda is in fact the better hospital. One way of sorting this out is to find a measure of risk for a particular patient having a particular operation. If we have a system to work out the expected death rate for a group of patients, we can easily tell who is doing better. If our risk system tells us St Mun
Related Questions
- Which stress test is superior for perioperative cardiac risk stratification in patients undergoing major vascular surgery?
- Is hormonal activation during exercise useful for risk stratification in patients with moderate congestive heart failure?
- Which Risk Stratification Algorithms or Guidelines Delineate Risk Accurately, and in a Clinically Meaningful Way?
