Referral Networks, Racial Inequity, and Hospital Quality for Open Heart Surgery.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Differences in the quality of hospitals where Black and White patients receive coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery have been documented. We examined the contributions of physician networks to the gap.

Methods

This was a cross-sectional study of all Medicare fee-for-service Black and White patients undergoing elective CABG during 2017 to 2019; the primary care physicians and cardiologists treating them for 12 months before surgery (the patients' physician network); and CABG-performing hospitals within 100 miles of each patient. We measured the strength of ties between treating physicians and hospitals as the number of shared prior CABG patients (24 months before surgery). Conditional logit models assessed the relationship between race, prior physician-ho

SUBMITTER: Gibson CB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11745697 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature