The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program® (ACS NSQIP®) is at the intersection of raising surgical quality and lowering costs. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Quality Forum, and other leading organizations recognize the value of using reliable, clinical data to address the soaring costs of health care. ACS NSQIP Pediatric has the tools, training, customization options, and, most importantly, data to keep your hospital ahead of the curve. Will you join us in making your hospital’s quality of care as good as it can be while helping reduce the cost of that care?
A Unique Opportunity
The ACS NSQIP Pediatric is the only national database to report multispecialty surgical outcomes in children. Quality improvement programs in the pediatric population are limited to specific operations or medical fields, such as the effort by the New York State Department of Health to collect data on pediatric cardiac surgery for congenital defects. Other quality programs attempt to use data primarily from administrative databases, which are usually not as robust as clinical data. Through participation in this program, your hospital will have access to an important quality improvement program for pediatric surgical care.
Use of Robust Clinical Data
One of the strengths of the ACS NSQIP Pediatric is its use of accurate and robust clinical data. A dedicated and highly trained Surgical Clinical Reviewer takes responsibility for collecting preoperative risk factors, intraoperative variables, and 30-day postoperative outcomes for each case included in the ACS NSQIP Pediatric. The data are submitted through a secure Web-based system with built-in software checks and user information prompts to ensure completeness, uniformity, and validity of the data.
Access to Extensive Reporting System
The ACS NSQIP Pediatric has an extensive reporting system consisting of case details reports, case occurrence reports, benchmarking reports, and risk adjusted semiannual reports. The semiannual reports provide comprehensive measures of a site's outcomes performance as compared with that of other participating sites while adjusting for a number of risk variables that can affect this comparison. The program continues to grow each year, allowing for a greater development of reports necessary for the success of quality improvement efforts made at ACS NSQIP Pediatric hospitals.
Reduce Costs by Improving Care
A vital component of the program is "closing the loop" to improve surgical care using the data collection and reports. Many hospitals in the ACS NSQIP Pediatric have had success in using their outcomes and reports to find areas within surgical care on which to focus quality improvement efforts. Such quality improvement efforts can not only improve patient care and outcomes, but can also reduce hospital costs by decreasing the number of patient complications.
