Two Pittsburgh-area hospitals and one near State College are being called out by a health care think tank for performing what it calls unnecessary back surgeries.
A report released earlier this month by the Massachusetts-based Lown Institute says around 38% of spinal fusions performed at Heritage Valley Sewickley weren’t warranted, the fourth-highest rate of any hospital in the nation.
Mount Nittany Medical Center had an overuse rate of 57%, making it far and away the study’s worst offender for performing unnecessary spinal fusions.
At St. Clair Hospital in Mt. Lebanon, 30% of vertebroplasties — when surgeons fill spinal compression fractures with specialized cement — were deemed unnecessary.
St. Clair was more likely than any other hospital in the state to use this procedure, according to the report.
The Lown Institute analyzed Medicare claims from 2020 to 2023 to make its report, which identified more than 200,000 needless procedures costing the program nearly $2 billion.
Thomas Pangburn, chief medical officer for Heritage Valley, defended the Sewickley hospital’s practices. He said the report lacks specificity in what symptoms lead hospitals to recommend spinal fusions, and a vast majority of Medicare patients who get the procedure are first approved by the federal program.
Neither St. Clair Hospital nor Mount Nittany Medical Center returned requests for comment.
Spinal fusions can be useful for some conditions, but are often overused, the Lown Institute argues. For vertebroplasties, the think tank cites several studies that show little difference versus a placebo.
These surgeries are part of a wider wastefulness issue in American health care, according to Lown Institute President Dr. Vikas Saini.
“Every field of medicine has more than the public realizes of stuff like this where the evidence doesn’t really support it that much,” Saini said. “When you do it across all of American health care, it’s actually a significant piece of the health care cost.”
Spinal fusion and vertebroplasty were both named by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in a recent list of 17 treatments it considers to be overused or prone to waste, fraud and abuse.
This is the second annual report on back surgeries from the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan group that examines health outcomes, patient-doctor relationships and more.
Last year’s report also named Mount Nittany Medical Center and Heritage Valley Sewickley. The latest numbers represent a slight improvement for both hospitals.
The Lown Institute did not offer a state-by-state breakdown in the 2024 report, so it’s unclear how St. Clair’s overuse rate has moved since then.
Saini said high overuse rates, especially at smaller hospitals, may be driven by an individual doctor who’s fond of these procedures. And at any hospital, a preference for these surgeries may be part of the wider organizational culture.
But clear solutions remain elusive.
“It’s hard to know exactly what the drivers are in any given hospital,” Saini said.
Jack Troy is a TribLive reporter covering business and health care. A Pittsburgh native, he joined the Trib in January 2024 after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. He can be reached at
First Appeared on
Source link
