The relationship between operator volume and outcomes after percutaneous coronary interventions in high volume hospitals in 1994–199611A list of members of the Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group appears in Appendix B. The northern New England experience

AbstractOBJECTIVESThe purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between annual operator volume and outcomes of percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) using contemporaneous data.BACKGROUNDThe 1997 American College of Cardiology (ACC)/American Heart Association task force based their recommendation that interventionists perform ≥75 procedures per year to maintain competency in PCI on data collected largely in the early 1990s. The practice of interventional cardiology has since changed with the availability of new devices and drugs.METHODSData were collected from 1994 through 1996 on 15,080 PCIs performed during 14,498 hospitalizations by 47 interventional cardiologists practicing at the five high volume (>600 procedures per hospital per year) hospitals in northern New England and one Massachusetts- based institution that support these procedures. Operators were categorized into terciles based on their annualized volume of procedures. Multivariate regression analysis was used to control for case-mix. In-hospital outcomes included death, emergency coronary artery bypass graft surgery (eCABG), non-emergency CABG (non-eCABG), myocardial infarction (MI), death and clinical success (≥1 attempted lesion dilated to