Health Care Management Papers
Title
Assessment of Surfactant Use in Preterm Infants as a Marker of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Quality
Document Type
Technical Report
Date of this Version
1-2011
Publication Source
BMC Health Services Research
Volume
11
DOI
10.1186/1472-6963-11-22
Abstract
Background
Proposed neonatal quality measures have included structural measures such as average daily census, and outcome measures such as mortality and rates of complications of prematurity. However, process measures have remained largely unexamined. The objective of this research was to examine variation in surfactant use as a possible process measure of neonatal quality.
Methods
We obtained data on infants 30 to 34 weeks gestation admitted with respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) within 48 hours of birth to 16 hospitals participating in the Pediatric Health Information Systems database from 2001-2006. Models were developed to describe hospital variation in surfactant use and identify patient and hospital predictors of use. Another cohort of all infants admitted within 24 hours of birth was used to obtain adjusted neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) mortality rates. To assess the construct validity of surfactant use as a quality metric, adjusted hospital rates of mortality and surfactant use were compared using Kendall's tau.
Results
Of 3,633 infants, 46% received surfactant. For individual hospitals, the adjusted odds of surfactant use varied from 2.2 times greater to 5.9 times less than the hospital with the median adjusted odds of surfactant use. Increased annual admissions of extremely low birth weight infants to the NICU were associated with greater surfactant use (OR 1.80, 95% CI 1.02-3.19). The correlation between adjusted hospital rates of surfactant use and in-hospital mortality was 0.37 (Kendall's tau p = 0.051).
Conclusions
Though results were encouraging, efforts to examine surfactant use in infants with RDS as a process measure reflecting quality of care revealed significant challenges. Difficulties related to adequate measurement including defining RDS using administrative data, accounting for care received prior to transfer, and adjusting for severity of illness will need to be addressed to improve the utility of this measure.
Copyright/Permission Statement
© Kaplan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Recommended Citation
Kaplan, H. C., Lorch, S. A., Pinto-Martin, J., Putt, M. E., & Silber, J. H. (2011). Assessment of Surfactant Use in Preterm Infants as a Marker of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Quality. BMC Health Services Research, 11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-11-22
Date Posted: 27 November 2017
This document has been peer reviewed.