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A south Alabama hospital was highlighted in a recent report as performing one of the highest rates of unnecessary back surgeries in the country.

Over 37% of the spinal fusions performed at Mobile Infirmary were considered to be ‘unnecessary’ by the Lown Institute, a non-partisan think-tank in Massachusetts that releases an annual hospital ranking focused on patient safety and the value of care.

The national rate of spinal fusion overuse is 14%, according to the analysis.

Hospitals performed more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries over a three-year period, according to an analysis by the Lown Institute, a health care watchdog group. The useless treatments put patients at risk for complications and cost Medicare about $2 billion, the analysis found. Furthermore, there was a large variation in rates of overuse among individual hospitals, ranging from zero to more than half of procedures. More

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A report last week from the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, found hospitals and physicians performed over 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries on Medicare beneficiaries over three years, based on three years’ worth of Medicare and Medicare Advantage claims data. Those procedures cost Medicare about $2 billion between 2019 and 2022, the report said. More

A new analysis revealed that Medicare spent roughly $2 billion over three years on unnecessary back surgeries for older adults. This alarming figure comes from research conducted by the nonpartisan Lown Institute think tank. The study examined common procedures including spinal fusion, laminectomy, and vertebroplasty, finding that an unnecessary back surgery is performed on a Medicare beneficiary every eight minutes. More than 200,000 procedures were identified as potentially unnecessary during the study period. More

Over 200,000 back surgeries were performed unnecessarily in the United States over the course of three years, according to a new Lown Institute report. In sum, these low-value back procedures cost Medicare about $2 billion after three years, roughly $600 million annually. “We trust that our doctors make decisions based on the best available evidence, but that’s not always the case,” Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, said in an organizational release. “In spinal surgery, as with other fields of medicine, physicians routinely overlook evidence to make exceptions, sometimes at shockingly high rates. This type of waste in Medicare is costly, both in terms of spending, and in risk to patients.” More

Hospitals performed more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries on Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. over three years, according to a new analysis. More

In the last three years, U.S. hospitals performed more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries on Medicare beneficiaries, according to a Nov. 14 report by the Lown Institute Hospital Index. More