Where Patients Live Contributes to Whether They Choose Elective Surgery

If you have a bad back and live in Lancaster, Pa., you are more than twice as likely to undergo elective back surgery than someone who lives in Syracuse, N.Y. A Syracusan with heart disease is half as likely to undergo balloon angioplasty to clear clogged arteries than a similar patient in Syosset, Long Island, N.Y. And a woman with breast cancer in Buffalo, N.Y., is twice as likely to undergo a mastectomy than a woman with the same diagnosis in Syracuse. These are some of the geographic variations listed in a new report that finds that where you live can play a major factor in determining whether or not you go under the knife to treat a medical condition.

The Dartmouth Atlas Project looked at rates of elective, or optional, surgeries among Medicare patients between 2008 and 2010. It found wide variations in the rates of these operations from city to city and region to region. For more than 20 years, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has been documenting variations in how medical services are distributed and used in the U.S. The report says surgery rates vary because doctors, not patients, often decide if the latter get elective surgery. For more information, click here to read the full release.