Abstract
A paradigm shift in the structure and delivery of healthcare in the United States occurred on March 23, 2010 when President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or ACA), which was subsequently upheld against challenges in the United States Supreme Court in June 2012. Now in the post-ACA era as the various provisions of the law move through stages of implementation, it is critical for surgeons to understand the moving pieces. A central tenet of the ACA is to foster quality in healthcare by holding healthcare providers, both at the institutional and physician levels, accountable for the care they provide to patients. To this end, the Secretary of the Department and Health and Human Services (HHS) developed the United States National Quality Strategy (NQS) with a core aim to “measure care delivery and outcomes using consistent, nationally-endorsed measures to provide information that is timely, actionable, and meaningful to both providers and patients.” Fostering surgical quality, as discussed in this book, has been a doctrine of the surgical profession long before the enactment of the ACA. Nevertheless, these regulatory changes and additions are likely here to stay, and surgeons must understand the impact of these national healthcare quality initiatives.
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Liu, J.B., Hall, B.L., Ko, C.Y. (2017). National Quality Improvement: Federal Regulation, Public Reporting, and the Surgeon. In: Kelz, R., Wong, S. (eds) Surgical Quality Improvement. Success in Academic Surgery. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23356-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23356-7_12
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