A statewide collaborative between 35 hospital systems and a large insurance provider showed that the implementation of a performance metric linked with financial reimbursement designed to improve postoperative surveillance of patients who underwent endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) for abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) showed a marked improvement in rates of one-year follow-up over a four-and-a-half- year period, according to a new study.
The multi-institutional analysis determined that the average rate of EVAR surveillance imaging in 2017 was just 27.1% but climbed to 70.8% in 2021.
The data were among a tranche of findings from a database established in a collaborative with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan that collects information on all vascular procedures performed within the state. The results—which also looked at contemporary EVAR surveillance trends in Michigan and the impact of surveillance on one-year morbidity and mortality—were revealed by Frank Davis, MD, an assistant professor of vascular surgery at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor during SCVS 2024.
“EVAR surveillance imaging is important in order to detect the long-term durability of EVARs, as it is able to increase the number of reinterventions, but we also show that it decreases one-year mortality independent of patient risk factors,” Davis said. “In addition, we show that the implementation of a statewide performance metric can profoundly increase the rate of EVAR postoperative surveillance.”
