Defining Benchmarks in Bariatric Surgery - A Global Analysis of Laparoscopic Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass and Sleeve Gastrectomy

Background With the growing complexity and cost of modern surgical practice, quality assessment becomes mandatory. The notion of quality and quality assessment is widely recognized and used in the world of business and manufacturing. A possible tool of quality assessment is benchmarking. Benchmarking is a process of measuring performance by comparison to the outcomes achieved by the best "service provider" in a specific domain. Usually, a benchmark describes the ''best possible'' outcome of a benchmarking subject to whom comparison can be performed. In the surgical community, however, such benchmarks - best possible outcomes - for specific procedures, not just the pooled overall performance, are lacking.

In 2016, a first landmark study defining benchmark outcomes for liver resection was published in Annals of Surgery by a group of international authors invited and guided by our department. More recently, further surgical outcomes (liver transplantation, minimally invasive esophagectomy) have been benchmarked and have been accepted for publication.

Since laparoscopic bariatric surgery has become a standardized and widely performed procedure worldwide, quality assessment is of major importance. To identify the best possible outcomes (i.e. the benchmarks), data from high-volume centers (based on official IFSO criteria) in low risk patients will be analyzed. These benchmarks will serve as "optimal outcomes" for comparison with single center outcomes, high-risk patients and future developments.

Aim The primary aim is to define benchmark outcomes based on assessment of post procedural complications according to the Clavien-Dindo classification for surgical complications and the comprehensive complication index CCI™ at discharge and at 90-days. The CCI® expresses morbidity on a continuous numeric scale from 0 (no complications) to 100 (death) by weighing all postoperative complications according to the Clavien-Dindo classification for their respective severity. Secondary outcome measure are patient survival and excess BMI loss (EBMIL).

Data Security This multicenter international study is designed to harvest prospectively collected retrospective data via an encrypted (i.e. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol) online platform (https://bbenchmarks.org/) that meets Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards and is accessible only by secured login membership.