Assessment of surgeon-based treatment quality of colorectal cancer

Objective To assess surgeon specific treatment quality of colorectal cancer using single indicator usage rate and multi-indicator comprehensive score and to provide evidences for the improvement of treatment quality of colorectal cancer and the performance assessment of doctors.Methods Medical records of 1 159 colorectal cancer inpatients dismissed from 4 hostitals in Harbin city between June 2011 and June 2013 were collected.The surgeon specific treatment item usage rate was calculated by the number of the inpatients with the indication for an examination or treatment being denominated by the number of inpatients receiving the examination or treatment.Latent variable model and Bayesian parameter estimation were adopted to integrate multiple evaluation indicators and then the comprehensive score of treatment quality was calculated for each of the 14 surgeons.Results There were obvious variations in the usage rate of the examination or treatments for the inpatients among the surgeons.The usage rates of preoperative examination of biochemical indicators,renal function,and chest X-ray ranged between 3.9% and 97.8%;the proportion of the surgeons recording the number of lymph nodes detected and the number of lymph node with tumor cell infiltration in pathological report was from 95.9% to 100.0%.The highest surgeon specific comprehensive quality score was 0.405 7 and the second-highest score was 0.387 5;while the lowest score was -0.596 7 for all the surgeons.Conclusion The comprehensive quality score calculated by integrating multi-dimensional indicatiors could be used to evaluate surgeon specific overall treatment quality of colorectal cancer and the usage rate of an examination or treatment could be used to assess indicator specific treatment quality of a surgeon based on the results of comprehensive evaluation.