CHICAGO: The American College of Surgeons Quality Verification Program (ACS QVP) has recognized its inaugural 25 verified hospitals during this year’s ACS Quality and Safety Conference, which took place July 15–18 in Chicago. First launched in July 2021, ACS QVP provides a proven, standardized method for establishing, measuring, and improving a hospital’s quality infrastructure across all surgical departments.
The inaugural QVP centers includes three international hospitals—two in Japan and one in Australia—and 22 U.S. hospitals. The first group of hospitals verified by ACS QVP includes a variety of hospital types and sizes, such as community, large and mid-size academic, public safety-net, military, and small/rural, among others. These hospitals were selected to help ensure that ACS QVP can adapt to unique hospital circumstances and provide customized, actionable feedback to a diverse group of hospitals.
“The Quality Verification Program of the American College of Surgeons is important and unique because it is really a wholistic view of how surgery is delivered in a hospital and how surgery can be improved in a hospital,” said Clifford Y. Ko, MD, MS, MSHS, FACS, FASCRS, Director, ACS Division of Research and Optimal Patient Care. “It brings together everyone involved in surgery and helps them develop their own specific improvement journeys to improve patient care and the overall quality of a hospital.”
“We are thrilled to recognize our first 25 verified hospitals and are excited about expanding QVP to more and more hospitals around the nation and around the world. Just as importantly, now that we have this first network of 25, they will be able to learn from each other and teach others how to embark on this quality journey,” Dr. Ko added.
“I think QVP brings a sense of structure and vision to really drive engagement of the people doing the clinical work. It has been a great asset to our quality program, and I believe it has really changed the dynamic of how we care for patients at Inova,” said John J. Moynihan, MD, FACS, president, Inova Surgery Service Line.
ACS QVP is based on 12 program standards, outlined in the Optimal Resources for Surgical Quality and Safety 2021 ACS QVP Standards manual. The ACS QVP standards are adapted from core elements of the Optimal Resources for Surgical Quality and Safety, or “Red Book.” The program builds on the College’s longstanding commitment to surgical quality by using principles gleaned from experience working with the roughly 3,000 hospitals that participate in ACS Quality Programs. The key principles of ACS QVP are driven by data surveillance and standardized processes and systems to find, fix, and prevent problems to improve the quality and safety of surgical patient care.
“At New York-Presbyterian Hospital, QVP really helped us take a deep look at how care was delivered throughout the system,” said ACS Regent Fabrizio Michelassi, MD, FACS, Lewis Atterbury Stimson Professor of Surgery and chairman of surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, and surgeon-in-chief at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “We wanted to make sure that care delivered in one site was exactly the same as care delivered in another site. We wanted to make sure that patients would receive the same care no matter what site they were going to be cared for at, no matter what door they use to enter our system.”
ACS QVP hospitals receive an in-depth assessment at hospital and specialty levels. The assessment includes customized, actionable recommendations—such as leadership and safety culture. ACS QVP provides the tools for hospitals to develop a standardized approach to surgical care to help reduce complications, minimize waste, and increase the value of surgical care for their patients.
View the full list of inaugural ACS QVP hospitals on the ACS website, and learn more about ACS QVP.
