About FSCI
The Florida Surgical Care Initiative is a partnership between the Florida Hospital Association and the American College of Surgeons (ACS) that aims to help Florida hospitals improve the quality of surgical care, prevent complications and reduce costs – by working together. The innovation at the heart of FSCI is a customized version of the ACS National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP), a program originally founded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and which has a 15-year history of significantly reducing complications and deaths.
High-Impact Quality Measures
FSCI measures outcomes in four high-impact surgical areas: surgical site infection, urinary tract infection, colorectal outcomes, and elderly surgery outcomes. These measures were chosen because they are applicable to hospitals of all sizes and types, and they cover the most common complications.
These measures were developed by the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) in partnership with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). After review by the National Quality Forum, CMS will begin to implement them as national quality measures as early as next year.
Highly Effective and Different From Other Quality Programs
FSCI stands apart from other quality improvement programs in the way it measures and improves the quality of hospital-based surgical care, because it:
- Uses medical chart data gathered by clinically trained personnel rather than insurance claims data derived from medical bills
- Adjusts for risk so that the patient’s condition is taken into consideration when assessing the outcome
- Evaluates how the patient is doing 30 days after an operation, since more than half of complications occur after discharge from the hospital
- Builds commitment and collaboration among surgeons, surgical teams and hospitals, because it is based on the highest quality data.
