Quality of Care for Weight Loss Patients

The Cedars-Sinai Weight Loss Center provides a complete range of medical and surgical treatment services for adults ranging from the overweight to the morbidly obese. Center physicians thoroughly evaluate each patient and provide the individualized care that is crucial to effective and long-lasting treatment success. This unique, comprehensive program addresses the medical, behavioral, nutritional, and, if necessary, the surgical and plastic surgical issues related to obesity.

Our program is accredited as a Bariatric Surgery Center of Excellence by the American College of Surgeons. Please see the American College of Surgeons' website for more information.

Quality of Care Measures for Bariatric Surgery Patients at Cedars-Sinai

At the Cedars-Sinai Weight Loss Center, we follow our surgical volumes and outcomes closely because we want to continually improve.  We are proud of how successful our program is because studies have demonstrated that physicians and hospitals that regularly perform a particular procedure tend to have better outcomes than those that perform the procedures less frequently.

The table below reflects data on patients who underwent gastric bypass or adjustable gastric band surgical procedures to treat obesity.*

To measure the quality of care given to patients having this procedure, the Cedars-Sinai Weight Loss Center monitors:

• The total number of procedures done
• The average length of stay (ALOS) at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for patients having the procedure. This refers to the average number of days a patient stays at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after being admitted. The goal is to ensure that all patients are appropriately treated in the hospital for their respective conditions, and are not hospitalized longer than necessary. (The expected length of stay shown in the chart below is based on risk-adjusted data collected by the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC).** The Cedars-Sinai average length of stay is shorter than expected.)
• Mortality, or the number of deaths that may have occurred due to the surgery

Source: UHC Clinical Data Base, patients discharged with DRG 621 between January 2010 and December 2010.

The procedures done at the Cedars-Sinai Weight Loss Center include:

• Sleeve gastrectomy, in which the surgeon removes a large portion of the stomach, reshaping the stomach into a vertical "sleeve" about the size of a thin banana. The new smaller stomach holds less food and helps a person feel fuller faster. At Cedars-Sinai, this procedure typically requires a one to two day stay in the hospital.
• Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB), in which the surgeon divides the upper portion of the stomach and creates a small pouch. This means the stomach can hold less food. The surgeon next attaches a section of the small intestine to the pouch so that the food eaten bypasses a portion of the small intestine.  It mixes with digestive enzymes further down the digestive tract. As a result, a person is able to eat less and less of the food eaten is absorbed by the body. At Cedars-Sinai, a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass procedure typically requires a one to two day stay in the hospital.
• Laparoscopic adjustable gastric band, in which the surgeon inserts an inflatable silicone band around the upper stomach, tubing and an access port that sit just under the patient's skin. The band creates a new, smaller pouch in the stomach. This means the person can eat less. It also slows down the movement of food through the stomach into the intestines. This means that the person feels fuller sooner. The band can be adjusted by injecting or removing saline solution through the port and tubing into the band. During the first year following surgery, adjustments need to be made every month for the best results. At Cedars-Sinai, laparoscopic adjustable gastric band surgery typically requires a one day stay in the hospital.

Results for Patients in the Cedars-Sinai 12-Week Medically Supervised Weight Loss Program

The Cedars-Sinai Weight Loss Center follows patients during their medically supervised weight loss program. At 12 weeks into the program, patients still in the program between July 2010 and June 2011 achieved the results below:

* MS-DRG 621 O.R. Procedures for obesity without co-morbidities, complications or major co-moribidities or complications (CC/MCC)

** The UHC is an alliance of 114 academic medical centers and 255 of their affiliated hospitals representing approximately 90% of the nation's non-profit academic medical centers; most of these facilities participate in the Clinical DataBase/Resource Manager.