Study: Poor neighborhood residents have higher risk of dying after surgery

Living in a neighborhood with high poverty levels, low education rates and lower-quality housing increased the likelihood that a patient died after surgery, regardless of whether or not their procedure took place at a hospital rated as high quality by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Published in January in JAMA Network Open, the cross-sectional review of nearly 1.9 million Medicare beneficiaries found patients from the wealthiest neighborhoods going to CMS highly rated hospitals for one of five common operations had a 3.9% probability of dying after the procedure. This compared with 8.1% of patients from the poorest neighborhoods going to lowest-rated hospitals. However, authors found patients from the most deprived neighborhoods going to the highest-rated hospitals had a similar risk of death as those in the wealthiest neighborhoods going to the lowest-rated hospitals. The authors noted the importance of health care systems developing pilot programs to identify patients who live in poorer neighborhoods and creating programs to improve those patients’ health before surgery. (University of Michigan news release, 2/15/23)