Phase of Care Mortality Analysis According to Individual Patient Risk Profile

In this article, Umana-Pizana et al performed a phases-of-care mortality analysis amongst 5141 cardiac surgery cases with a 4.6% crude mortality in a population with a median STS risk score of 5.8%. They demonstrate that triggers for mortality occured primarily preoperatively (49.3%), followed by in the intensive care unit (23.9%), intraoperatively (13.4%), discharge phase (10.4%), and postoperative floor (3.0%). Importantly, their findings demonstrate that the mortality distribution is bimodal, occuring in those at lowest and highest risk, and they provide targets for areas of improvement and elimination of triggers for mortality in the cardiac surgical patient.