Original ArticleThe Incidence of Endophthalmitis after Cataract Surgery among the U.S. Medicare Population Increased between 1994 and 2001
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Materials and Methods
Data for this project were derived from Medicare beneficiary claims files. All years of data that were available at the time of writing were used for our analyses. Data were available in 2 forms: research identifiable files (RIFs) and beneficiary encrypted files (BEFs). These 2 databases are very similar, with 2 exceptions: the degree of information regarding the date of service and the level of patient identifiers. The RIFs contain the exact date of billing and complete identifying
Results
The BEF and RIF datasets provided similar rates of endophthalmitis (Table 2), and as expected because of the increased number of days included, the 2-quarter rate was slightly higher than the 1-quarter rate for a given year. Among years with date-specific data available, 90-day postsurgery endophthalmitis rates ranged from 1.60 cases per 1000 surgeries in 1997 to 2.29 per 1000 in 2001 (Table 2). For years where BEFs and RIFs were both available, endophthalmitis rates did not differ
Discussion
The findings from this study suggest that endophthalmitis rates after cataract surgery increased in the U.S. between 1994 and 2001. Due to the lag in the availability of Medicare data for such analyses, we cannot comment on whether the endophthalmitis rate after cataract surgery has since stabilized or continued to increase. We report an endophthalmitis rate of 1.79 cases per 1000 in 1994 and a rate of 2.47 cases per 1000 in 2001, a 37% increase over this 8-year period. Two additional
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Gerry Anderson and Robert Herbert in providing de-identified datasets for analyses.
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Manuscript no. 2004-19.
Supported in part by the National Eye Institute, Bethesda, Maryland (grant no.: NEI K2400395), and the Grossman Fund for Preventive Ophthalmology, Baltimore, Maryland.