Laterality of subsequent surgery after index shoulder surgery

Mentors

Stephen Lyman, PhD
Robert Marx, MD

Scope

Procedural coding systems (CPT4 & ICD-9-CM) for administrative databases lack consistent coding of laterality for surgery of the appendicular skeleton. As a result, when studies are conducted looking at revision surgery, they are often truly looking at subsequent surgery rather than true revisions.

A previous study undertaken at Hospital for Special Surgery that looked at the laterality of subsequent knee and hip surgery is scheduled to be published in the Journal of Knee Surgery in February 2009. We have decided to conduct this same study in shoulder patients at HSS.

Patients identified as having undergone an index shoulder surgery (rotator cuff repair, shoulder instability repair, hemiarthroplasty of the shoulder, and total shoulder replacement) and a subsequent shoulder surgery (same procedures) between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2008 will be identified using the hospital billing database. The hospital OR database will be used to identify the surgical side for these patients both the index and subsequent surgeries in order to calculate concordance of surgical side by type of surgery, ages of patient, and time since index surgery.

The summer student will be responsible for the acquisition and data management of these databases, will assist Dr. Lyman in the analysis of these data, and will be responsible for generating the manuscript for publication.

Contact

This position is already filled.