Analyzing total knee arthroplasty using surgical volume of different hospital levels

The purpose of this research is to discover valuable medical facts by mining TKA (total knee arthroplasty) surgical volume of three different hospital levels from Taiwan NHI (National Health Insurance) database. In this paper, there are three main objectives provided: (1) to build up the learning curves using the patients¿ outcomes of three different hospital levels; (2) to characterize whether TKA surgical volume correlates with infection rate and mortality rate; and (3) to examine whether there are differences in the infection rate and mortality rate pair-wise comparisons among medical center, district hospital, and local hospital. After building up the learning curves, the results of Z-test confirm the differences between these three observed levels. For verification, we¿ve interviewed five specialist surgeons with a semi-structure questionnaire containing some close questions and some open-end, and the investigative results are consistent with the results from data analysis.