Silber, Jeffrey H2023-05-222023-05-222007-02-262016-11-17https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/38188One aspect of the quality of surgical care is the length of the time patients spend in the operating room and under anesthesia. It is generally believed that the longer a surgical procedure, the greater the chance of a complication. But because obtaining procedure and anesthesia times usually involves a direct review of medical records, few large-scale studies are able to examine procedure times. This Issue Brief summarizes new work that validates the use of Medicare billing data as a proxy for anesthesia times, and illustrates how these data can shed light on hospital and patient characteristics that affect procedure duration and surgical quality.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/Brief