Quality Control in Cardiac Surgery in the United States

Abstract

Quality control in cardiac surgery has gained widespread importance in recent years in the United States. There are several pathways in which quality control is executed in today’s hospital environment. The internal review process is geared to what’s identifying quality issues and implementing performance improvement protocols. The internal review process is mostly based on peer review. It may affect individual cases in the peer review of individual patient’s course; it may also involve the creation of benchmarks and performance improvement plans for either individual practitioners or for whole departments and service lines.

External quality control is executed by several entities. Insurance companies and other payers insist more and more on quality reporting and defined benchmarks for the performance of service lines in hospitals in the field of cardiac surgery. In addition, several media outlets provide rankings of either hospitals or individual practitioners. Outcome data are available more and more online so that patients and their families can obtain information on either the hospitals and their service lines or individual practitioners within the hospital through printed or online material. A very important part of quality control and improvement is the establishment of performance improvement planning within a department or service line. All these measures have led to a substantial amount of time and effort dedicated by physicians and support personnel to collect data, review data, and formulate performance improvement plans. There’s no question that this has changed dramatically the way that cardiac surgery is provided in the United States, and one can honestly say that the quality of cardiac surgery has greatly improved in recent years, thanks to a very diligent quality control and performance improvement planning.