Edward Hannan has studied long-term survival rates for surgeries at the state's leading medical facilities, such as this heart operation being performed at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.

Minimizing Medical Risks

Americans entering medical facilities with serious afflictions have come to expect that the best expertise and decision-making will be marshaled toward improving their conditions. Yet due to several factors such facilities do not always deliver at maximum efficiency.
For several years, Edward Hannan of the Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior has been involved in the development and use of clinical databases for a variety of medial treatments, including cardiac surgery, coronary angioplasty, carotid endarterectomy, and trauma care. These databases have been used to identify risk factors related to mortality and complications, to predict the occurrence of these adverse events, and to assess provider performance after having adjusted for differences in the pre-procedural risk of patients.

Articles describing this work have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, Medical Care, the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, the Journal of Trauma, Health Services Research, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Surgery, the American Heart Journal, and various other leading publications.

In late 2001 the New York State Department of Health and UAlbany’s School of Public Health were awarded a three-year contract by the federal Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality to reduce medical errors by 50 percent in five years. Hannan was charged with overseeing all of the analyses and evaluations related to the project, which will identify risk-reduction strategies and foster hospital demonstration projects to test and refine quality care initiatives.

Hannan’s work with the state’s Department of Health in collecting and reporting coronary artery bypass surgery data contributed to a drop from 4.17 to 2.45 deaths per 100 in risk-adjusted mortality rates for this surgery in New York from 1989 to 1992.

Also, in 1999, after studying more than 30,000 New York State patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty, his team of researchers compared relative long-term survival rates as a function of the location and extent of the patients’ coronary artery disease. His analysis of clinical data systems for these two procedures resulted in 14 scholarly publications over a five-year period in leading peer-review journals.

Since 2000, Hannan has been a principal investigator on a study identifying and comparing the importance of significant pre-hip fracture predictors upon functional status and mortality at six months. He has also led studies examining the relationship between mortality and hospital procedure volume for three types of cancer operations, the impact of surgeon type and surgeon processes of care on mortality for patients undergoing carotid endarterectomy, and on numerous issues relating to outcomes of trauma patients in New York.