Of the 232 342 patients studied, 53 813 (23.2%) experienced a major complication not present on admission and 4535 (2.0%) died within 30 days of admission. The death rate among patients with complications was 8.4%. The surgical case types and clinical characteristics of the patient cohort are shown in Table 3. Slightly more than half of patients (51.2%) were classified in an orthopedic surgery DRG, with the next largest group of patients (36.4%) undergoing digestive tract and hepatobiliary surgeries. Chronic medical conditions, with the exception of hypertension, were relatively uncommon among these patients. Patients who experienced complications and were included in our analyses of failure-to-rescue were similar to the broader group of patients in our mortality analyses with respect to their comorbidities, but orthopedic surgery patients were less prominently represented among patients with complications than in the overall sample.