2020/12/11
Keio University
A joint research group, including Project Assistant Professor Hirotaka Kato of the Keio University Graduate School of Health Management (a visiting researcher at the Keio University Graduate School of Business Administration at the time of the study), Assistant Professor Yusuke Tsugawa of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Associate Professor Anupam B. Jena of Harvard University, used large-scale medical data from Americans aged 65 and older to reveal that the mortality rate for patients who underwent surgery on their surgeon's birthday was higher than for those who had surgery on other days. The same result was found when comparing patients treated by the same surgeon, with the mortality rate for patients undergoing surgery on the surgeon's birthday increasing by 1.3 percentage points (a 23% relative increase) compared to patients who had surgery on other days. This is considered a clinically significant and non-negligible difference. It is said that many things can distract a surgeon during an operation, such as ringtones, medical equipment malfunctions, and conversations not necessarily related to the surgical procedure. However, the impact of such intraoperative distractions on patient mortality has been little studied.
This study hypothesized that a surgeon's performance might change on their birthday due to increased distraction or a rush to finish the operation more quickly. The researchers treated the surgeon's birthday as a "natural experiment" to examine the relationship between distraction and surgeon performance (since most patients do not know their surgeon's birthday and thus do not choose their surgery date based on it, and by limiting the study to emergency surgeries, the possibility of patients selecting the date was further reduced). They then examined the relationship between the surgeon's birthday and patient mortality. The results of this study suggest that a surgeon's performance can be influenced by life events not directly related to their work, providing valuable information for further improving the quality of medical care.
The findings of this research were published online in the Christmas issue of the international British academic journal "British Medical Journal (BMJ)" on December 10, 2020 (UK time).
Please see below for the full press release.