The surgery was tried-- disastrously-- in the 1950s, then resumed in the last decade after advances in postoperative care and development of sealants for air leaks improved survival after surgery, said Dr . Mark Lavietes, director of the pulmonary function lab at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark.
42.
And while the analysis accounted for the severity of a patient's illness, it did not account for other factors that might influence a transplant center's performance, such as whether a patient received preoperative and postoperative care at other hospitals, or whether a small hospital's ranking might be skewed by the death of just one or two people.
43.
The state uses several statistical measures and adjusts the overall statistics to account for about 45 risk factors-- like differences in the severity of illness among patients, the state of patients'health before the operation, the skill of the operating team and general postoperative care after the surgery-- to arrive at risk-adjusted death rates for all the hospitals.
