Amanda Kong on Patterns of Care in High and Low Level Hospitals

Amanda Kong, MD, MS, associate professor of surgery at Medical College of Wisconsin, discusses patterns of care in high- and low-volume hospitals.

Published studies have found that patients with cancer who go to hospitals treating more patients do better than those who go to hospitals treating fewer patients with that type of cancer.

Kong and other researchers looked at high- and low-volume hospitals and found that high-volume hospitals treat aggressive cancer more aggressively. Low-volume hospitals were either doing too much aggressive surgery or not enough surgery.

Variables that affect patient outcome, such as economic status, were included in the analysis, but researchers still concluded that patterns of care were a strong differentiating factor between high- and low-volume hospitals.