CESORCenter for Emergency Surgery Outcomes Research
About CESOR
CESOR is housed within the Department of Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. The center is focused on improving the quality, consistency, and outcomes of care in trauma, emergency surgery, and surgical critical care through rigorous, practice-relevant research.
Center overview
Emergency surgical care often requires consequential decisions to be made under conditions of physiologic instability, time pressure, and incomplete evidence. Practice variation is common, and many of the most important questions in acute care surgery remain insufficiently studied. CESOR was created to address this problem by developing a focused academic infrastructure for outcomes research in emergency surgery, trauma, and surgical critical care.
The center is designed to generate evidence that is both methodologically rigorous and clinically useful. Its orientation is deliberately translational: not simply to describe care, but to identify unwarranted variation, evaluate the effectiveness of commonly used interventions, and support more consistent, evidence-informed practice.
Approach
CESOR conducts multicenter observational studies, prospective snapshot cohort studies, and analytically robust evaluations using methods that include causal inference and other contemporary approaches to clinical outcomes research. These projects are developed within collaborative networks that allow real-world data to be studied across institutions and health systems.
Function
In addition to leading its own research agenda, CESOR supports investigators with study design, database development, statistical analysis, and manuscript preparation. The center therefore functions both as a research engine and as a methodological resource for collaborators pursuing clinically meaningful questions.
Project development
Within the broader CESOR framework, the Idea Development and Evaluation Support (IDES) initiative serves as the entry point for new projects and collaborations. IDES is intended to lower the barrier to research engagement by providing a structured pathway for capturing early-stage ideas, refining questions, assessing feasibility, and identifying appropriate study designs.
What CESOR is built to do
Study outcomes, variation in care, and comparative effectiveness in emergency surgical disease.
Provide methodological, analytic, and writing support for clinically grounded projects.
Use shared infrastructure and multicenter networks to move promising ideas efficiently into active studies.
Translate findings into approaches that can improve consistency, quality, and patient outcomes.