The Relationship Between Hospital Volume and Outcomes of Hepatic Resection for Hepatocellular Carcinoma

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Abstract
TODAY'S CHANGING health care environment is being driven, in part, by external pressures on providers to deliver economical, high-quality care. For some medical therapies, quality of care varies little among providers, making cost a primary focus.1,2 For other treatments, however, quality of care is not uniform. Such is the case with coronary angioplasty, coronary surgery, and bone marrow and solid organ transplantation. For these complex therapies, a volume-outcome relationship exists where poor patient outcome, such as in-hospital mortality, is related to low provider volume and inexperience.1,3-6 These volume-outcome relations serve as the basis for the argument that high-risk procedures should be regionalized to centers of excellence.3,7,8