Surgical Care Improvement
Part of our continuing efforts at improving quality is participation in a national initiative for public reporting of quality measures promoted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Process of care measures show how often hospitals give recommended treatments known to get the best results for certain surgical procedures. Information about these treatments are taken from the patients’ records and converted into a percentage. This is one way to compare the quality of care that hospitals give.
SSCBR extracts data and submits the information to CMS for the applicable process of care measures for the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP). This is a specific set of guidelines in the treatment of surgical patients and preventing surgical site infections. Research has shown that following these guidelines leads to significantly better outcomes.
The results indicate how well a hospital is doing in following specific guidelines as a percentage of applicable cases and provides a comparison to the national average.