THE MEASUREMENT OF COMPLEXITY IN SURGICAL PATHOLOGY

The quantitation of effort both within and among surgical pathology la boratories is data which is being increasingly sought by physician man agers, hospital administrators and managed care organizations. Simple measurement of case numbers fails to adequately represent the work of a laboratory, The complexity of the cases reviewed is likely to explai n a significant portion of the variance in the time required to bring a case to final diagnosis. Measures which adequately reflect complexit y in surgical pathology cases have not been developed. We have studied a variety of extractable report features and correlated these with th e time required for case sign-out. Numbers of slides reviewed and tota l lines of factual data provided were strong correlates of the time re quired to complete case review, report construction and verification. Such data suggests that models can be constructed based on data that c an be gleaned from case reports and records which will relate such dat a to actual work time.