As federal lawmakers prepare to increase the use of performance measures to improve quality of care, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) National Surgical Quality Improvement Program has recognized Mayo Clinic's Rochester Methodist and Saint Mary's hospitals as having exemplary outcomes for surgical patient care.
As a participant in the ACS quality improvement program, Mayo Clinic hospitals are required to track the outcomes of inpatient and outpatient surgical procedures and collect data that directs patient safety and the quality of surgical care improvements. Mayo Clinic is the only facility in Minnesota and the only academic medical center in the Minnesota five-state region to have received this recognition.
"Whether training our staff to manage the nuances of each of our patients or utilizing new technology in the operating room, everything we do is about improving outcomes for patients," said Robert Cima, MD, vice chair for Quality and Safety in Mayo Clinic's Department of Surgery. "This recognition is important because it requires hospitals to track outcomes in five key clinical areas, and serves as another way for us drive quality improvement efforts and to be transparent, allowing patients to see how we're doing."
ACS NSQIP is the only nationally validated quality improvement program that measures and enhances the care of surgical patients. This program measures actual surgical results 30 days postoperatively as well as risk adjusts patient characteristics to compensate for differences among patient populations and acuity levels. The goal of ACS NSQIP is to reduce infection, illness or death related to a surgical procedures.
When adverse effects from surgical procedures are reduced or eliminated, a reduction in healthcare costs follows, according to the program. ACS NSQIP, a major program of the American College of Surgeons, is used in more than 225 hospitals.
The ACS quality improvement program commends a select group of hospitals for achieving exemplary outcome performances related to patient management in five clinical areas: DVT (deep vein thrombosis, thrombophlebitis and pulmonary embolism); cardiac incidents (cardiac arrest and myocardial infarction); respiratory incidents (unplanned intubation, ventilator dependence for more than 48 hours and pneumonia); SSI (surgical site infections -- superficial and deep incisional and organ-space SSIs); and urinary tract infection. The 26 hospitals that were commended this year attained exemplary results in two or more of the five areas listed above. Risk-adjusted data from the June 2008 ACS NSQIP Semiannual Report were used to determine which hospitals demonstrated exemplary outcomes.
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., performs more than 52,000 surgical procedures at its two hospitals each year, ranging from common to highly complex, minimally invasive, and robotic procedures. Mayo Clinic's staff in Minnesota includes more than 1,700 physicians representing virtually every subspecialty of medicine, providing care for more than 300,000 adults, infants, and children each year. For those requiring surgery, a team of more than 400 surgeons, anesthesiologists, and pathologists lead collaborative teams to ensure the best possible outcomes.
Photo obtained under Creative Commons license. -Ed
