Clinical outcomes in bariatric surgery

The Dutch Audit for Treatment of Obesity (DATO) provides individual and composite outcome measures, assessing the short-term postoperative outcome after bariatric surgery, enable the possibility to identify outliers. Most importantly, individual hospitals can identify differences in outcome, whereas these may remain hidden in daily practice. This between-hospital variation may initiate an improvement cycle. This will probably result in hospital and surgical quality improvements leading to improved outcomes in bariatric surgery.