For the second year in a row, Paul Klimo Jr. MD, MPH, a neurosurgeon at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Semmes Murphey Clinic, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital was awarded the Pediatrics Paper of the Year by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) during the CNS annual meeting in San Francisco, California.

The paper, "The Preventable Shunt Revision Rate: A Multicenter Evaluation," was published in Neurosurgery in March 2019.

The Preventable Shunt Revision Rate (PSRR) was introduced in 2016 as a quality metric to determine which shunt failures were avoidable. Shunt surgery is the most common procedure performed in neurosurgery, and shunt malfunction is the second most common cause of rehospitalization in children.

"PSRR goes directly to the heart of the current quality movement in health care," said Dr. Klimo. "Quality metrics lead to the implementation of processes to avert negative consequences and maximize positive results."

The paper evaluated two years of shunt operations data from nine participating centers in North America to determine the PSRR across institutions as well as the most common reasons for shunt failure. Of the 5,092 shunt operations performed, 861 failed within 90 days, an overall failure rate of 16.9 percent.