Social Vulnerability Index Is Potentially Valuable Data Point for Measuring Increased Risk of Emergency Ventral Hernia

Wolf A, Heron C, Bonner I, et al. Vulnerable Populations and the Emergency Ventral Hernia: A Retrospective Cohort Study. Surgery. 2024.

The authors used data from the ACS NSQIP database over a 6-year interval to identify sociodemographic characteristics of patients (n = 1,017) who underwent emergency ventral hernia repair. Patients who had open repair were included, and residential address was used to determine the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI); patients in the high and low SVI groups were compared.

The analysis showed that patients who underwent emergency operations were older and had higher social vulnerability. High SVI patients were 1.5 times more likely to undergo emergency operation; these patients also had significantly higher risk for nonhome discharge.

Patients undergoing emergency ventral hernia repair had significantly higher surgeon work RVU indicating the higher cost and complexity of managing emergency hernia repair.

The authors concluded that the SVI is a potentially valuable data point that can be easily incorporated into an electronic health record and used to obtain early identification of patients at increased risk for emergency ventral hernia repair.