Recent studies have made longitudinal assessments of case counts using State (e.g., United States) and Provincial (e.g., Canada) databases. Such databases rarely include either operating room (OR) or anesthesia times and, even when duration data are available, there are major statistical limitations to their use. We evaluated how to forecast short-term changes in OR caseload and workload (hours) and how to decide whether changes are outliers (e.g., significant, abrupt decline in anesthetics).
Observational cohort study.
Large teaching hospital.
35 years of annual anesthesia caseload data. Annual data were used without regard to where or when in the year each case was performed, thereby matching public use files. Changes in caseload or hours among four-week periods were examined within individual year-long periods using 159 consecutive four-week periods from the same hospital.
Series of 12 four-week periods of the hours of cases performed on workdays lacked trend or correlation among periods for 49 of 50 series and followed normal distributions for 50 of 50 series. These criteria also were satisfied for 50 of 50 series based on counts of cases. The Pearson r = 0.999 between hours of anesthetics and cases.
For purposes of time series analysis of total workload at a hospital within 1-year, hours of cases and counts of cases are interchangeable. Simple control chart methods of detecting sudden changes in workload or caseload, based simply on the sample mean and standard deviation from the preceding year, are appropriate.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 23 May 2018.
All research outputs
#19,951,180
of 25,382,440 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Clinical Anesthesia
#1,208
of 1,861 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#252,181
of 343,554 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Clinical Anesthesia
#24
of 67 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,382,440 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 18th percentile – i.e., 18% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,861 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.9. This one is in the 30th percentile – i.e., 30% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 343,554 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 22nd percentile – i.e., 22% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 67 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 53% of its contemporaries.
