Dollars and Sense: The Business of Pediatric Surgery

Introduction: This study evaluated North American pediatric surgeons' opinions and knowledge of business and economics in medicine and their perceptions of trends in their healthcare delivery environment.

Methods: We conducted an elective online survey of 1119 American Pediatric Surgical Association members. Over 8 mo, we iteratively developed the survey focused on four areas: opinion, knowledge, current practice environment, and trends in practice environment over the past 5 y.

Results: We received 227 (20.3%) complete surveys from pediatric surgeons. One hundred ninety four (85.5%) perceive healthcare as a business and most (85.9%) believe healthcare decisions may affect patients' out-of-pocket expenses. More than half (51.1%) of surgeons believe it has become more challenging to perform emergent cases and most believe staff quality has decreased for elective (56.4%) and emergent (63.0%) cases over the past 5 y.

Conclusions: Pediatric surgeons recognize that medicine is a business and have concerns regarding the decreasing quality of operating room staff and the increasing difficulty providing surgical care over the last 5 y.