A retrospective approach to evaluating potential adverse outcomes associated with delay of procedures for cardiovascular and cancer-related diagnoses in the context of COVID-19
Plain-language summary
When Vanderbilt University Medical Center suspended elective procedures and non-urgent visits early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers built an approach using electronic health record data to measure how those delays affected patients. Comparing procedures during the shutdown against the same weeks in 2019, they identified 416 negatively affected surgical procedures and found 27 statistically significant associations between procedure delay and adverse outcomes such as longer hospital stays, in-hospital death, later cancer stage at diagnosis, and lower five-year survival, with clinician review judging 88.9% of those associations plausible and potentially clinically significant. The method gives health systems a way to identify which delayed procedures carry real risk so they can prioritize rescheduling and communicate with patients.
Read the full paper (DOI: 10.1016/j.jbi.2020.103657).
This is a plain-language summary written for discoverability; the authoritative version is the published paper. Part of Travis Osterman's peer-reviewed publications.