What the Research Says When patients pass through a hospital s door, they want to know that they will receive high quality care.
Research suggests many factors affect the likelihood of good outcomes.
For example, age and severity of illness often matter. Another factor the number of cases of a given procedure that a facility performs has been consistently shown to relate to quality of outcomes for specific procedures. Internationally, for many different types of care and for many different surgeries, researchers have found that patients treated in hospitals with higher numbers of cases are less likely to have complications or to die after surgery. The lowest number of surgeries done in one hospital was just over 200. The highest number done in one hospital was over 2,000.