Medicare inpatient and 90-day postdischarge adverse outcomes in carotid artery surgery.

Background: Longitudinal, risk-adjusted measurement of outcomes of carotid artery (CA) surgery is necessary for the evaluation of quality performance and for the assessment of strategies of quality improvement.

Methods: Patients from quality coding hospitals who underwent CA surgery and met procedural and diagnostic coding requirements in the Medicare Inpatient Limited Data Set from 2009 to 2011 were used to design logistic prediction models for the Adverse Outcomes (AOs) of inpatient deaths, 3-sigma prolonged length-of-stay outliers (prLOS) among live discharges, 90-day post-discharge deaths without readmission (PD-90), and 90-day post-discharge readmissions (ReAdm-90).

Results: A total of 653 quality coding hospitals had 54,183 CA surgery cases.