Case Studies
Hospitals can potentially save millions of dollars by reducing complications. ACS NSQIP hospitals see results: fewer complications, shorter lengths of stay and increased surgical volumes.
- Decatur General Hospital in Alabama (178 beds) reduced it urinary tract infection rate from 2.6 to 0.8 percent, saving $42,000 in the first quarter.
- In Michigan, 33 hospitals participating in a NSQIP collaborative are saving more than $50 million a year by reducing complications.
- Surrey Memorial Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, reduced its general and vascuclar SSI rate by 5.7 percent and its breast surgery SSI rate by 13.3 percent over two years, saving more than $2.7 million.
- Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI saved $2 million/year by reducing its average length-of-stay by 1.54 days, while increasing general surgery billings by $2.25 million.
History of FSCI
The Florida Surgical Care Initiative is built on a proven method for significantly reducing complications, dating back 15 years. It is based on four high-impact measures that are designed to drive significant and rapid quality improvement.
1980’s – U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs developed the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) to help its 133 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals measure their quality of care, based on preoperative risk factors and postoperative outcomes.
They experienced significant success. The hospitals saw a 47 percent drop in postoperative mortality and a 43 percent drop in morbidity rates from 1991 to 2006.
2001 – American College of Surgeons (ACS)
In 2001, ACS launched a pilot program funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to demonstrate that NSQIP also functioned very well in private sector hospitals. In 2004, ACS began enrolling new private sector hospitals into NSQIP. ACS NSQIP became the first nationally validated, risk-adjusted, outcomes-based program to measure and improve the quality of surgical care across surgical specialties in the private sector. Today, nine out of the top 10 hospitals ranked as America’s Best Hospitals by U.S. News & World Report participate in ACS NSQIP.
Named “Best in the Nation” by the Institute of Medicine, NSQIP provides a prospective, peer-controlled, validated database of preoperative to 30-day post-surgical outcomes based on clinical data, not claims data from medical billings.
2010 – Florida Surgical Care Initiative
FSCI, developed through a partnership between the Florida Hospital Association and the American College of Surgeons, and endorsed by the Florida Chapter of ACS, 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 ACS NSQIP, focused on four quality measures selected from the approximately 20 standard outcome measures in the full program.
ACS developed the four measures in 2009 in partnership with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), with the goal of creating practical outcomes-based measures that would help hospitals achieve significant quality improvements.
In September 2009, ACS submitted these four surgical outcome measures to the National Quality Forum (NQF) for endorsement. If the measures receive NQF endorsement and are subsequently selected by CMS for implementation, FSCI participants will have a valuable head start in implementing these measures and using them to improve quality of care in Florida.
Today, Florida hospitals have the opportunity to access these proven tools and best practices in a program tailored exclusively for Florida hospitals. The FSCI program takes into account the specific challenges hospitals in Florida face, and is designed to drive significant results through common complications and procedures, and measures that are applicable to hospitals of all sizes and types.
For more detailed information on FSCI, click here.
