Parastomal hernias pose a challenging surgical problem without clear treatment paradigms due to a lack of high-quality evidence. In their study in this issue of JAMA Surgery, Howard et al 1 evaluated long-term recurrence of incisional and parastomal hernias after elective parastomal hernia repair in a national cohort of elderly patients. The authors creatively used Medicare claims data, resulting in a well-powered study that demonstrated that patients who had their ostomies reversed had the lowest rate of recurrent hernias. As the authors point out, the large sample size is offset by the lack of granularity, making it difficult to incorporate patient characteristics into surgical planning such as defect size, quality of the abdominal domain, and candidacy for ostomy reversal.Although this was not the focus of this study, prevention of hernia is a key issue to address. Correct sizing and placement of the ostomy defect is paramount, yet hernias still occur. Prophylactic mesh placement at the time of ostomy creation in the STOMAMESH trial failed to show differences in hernia development. 2 The finding that resiting an ostomy may be inferior to local repair is informative as it suggests that we can avoid what may be a more involved operation that creates an additional abdominal wall defect. However, the decision to resite possibly implies that the fascia at the original ostomy site was unsalvageable or may have failed a previous repair. This is a difficult issue to address regardless of study design as there is no objective, quantifiable definitions for the character of the stomal defect in relation to the quality of the surrounding abdominal wall or loss of domain. 3 In regard to repairs, previous groups, including the European Hernia Society, have established standardized classification systems for parastomal hernias. 4 Repair of larger type