Disparities in Antiemetic Prophylaxis Care Processes Predicted by Patient Neighborhood: Retrospective Cohort and Geospatial Analysis

Abstract Background Social determinants of health continue to drive persistent disparities in perioperative care. Our team has previously demonstrated racial and socioeconomic disparities in perioperative processes, notably in the administration of antiemetic prophylaxis, in several large perioperative registries. Given how neighborhoods are socially segregated in the United States, we examined geospatial clustering of perioperative antiemetic disparities. Objective The study aimed to determine whether disparities in perioperative antiemetic prophylaxis exhibit geographic clustering based on neighborhood-level disadvantage and whether patients from disadvantaged communities are more likely to be undertreated after adjusting for individual postoperative nausea and vomiting risk. Methods We conducted a retrospective cohort study of anesthetic records from the University of Utah Hospital involving 19,477 patients who met the inclusion criteria. We geocoded patient home addresses and combined them with the census block group–level neighborhood disadvantage, a composite index from the National Neighborhood Data Archive. We stratified our patients by antiemetic risk score and calculated the number of antiemetic interventions. We used Poisson spatial scan statistics, implemented in SaTScan (Information Management Services, Inc), to detect geographic clusters of undertreatment. Results We identified 1 significant cluster ( P <.001) of undertreated perioperative antiemetic prophylaxis cases. The relative risk of the whole cluster was 1.44, implying that patients within the cluster were 1.44 times more likely to receive fewer antiemetics after controlling for antiemetic risk. Patients from more disadvantaged neighborhoods were more likely to receive below-median antiemetic prophylaxis after controlling for risk. Conclusions To our knowledge, this is the first geospatial cluster analysis of perioperative process disparities; we leveraged innovative geostatistical methods and identified a spatially defined, geographic cluster of patients whose home address census-tract level neighborhood deprivation index predicted disparities in risk-adjusted antiemetic prophylaxis.