Health Authorities in British Columbia (BC) are spending around $5 million per year for 24 BC hospitals to participate in the US National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP). NSQIP, a surgery outcome measurement and reporting program, has been shown in US hospitals to reduce costly adverse outcomes, such as readmissions, extra procedures and longer stays.
The question of whether Canada could develop a similar program is at the heart of a new research project led by Dr Roanne Preston, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia.
“Participation in NSQIP for BC hospitals is costly because it requires each site to have a full-time nurse to perform chart reviews for 1,680 patients per year, to monitor their adverse health events in the 30 days after leaving hospital by telephone follow-up, and to carry out data management and analysis,” says Dr Preston. “It is also costly because the data are sent to Chicago for statistical analysis using a proprietary NSQIP database for $10,000 to $30,000 per hospital. Due to the cost, not all hospitals in BC are enrolled in NSQIP, and are therefore missing out on surgical outcomes data that could help them with systems improvements.”
“The BC Patient Safety and Quality Council and the Health Authorities are very interested in learning more about the benefits that have been achieved with NSQIP,” continues Dr Preston. “Can we establish a Canadian version of the US program which costs less per hospital than NSQIP using Canadian databases and which is calibrated to Canadian patients?”
This study, funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, aims to assess the relative benefit and cost of surgery quality outcomes reporting (SQOR), to increase the use and lower the cost of SQOR, and potentially to lay the foundation for a Canadian SQOR program.
PopData is linking data from the BC Ministry of Health and the BC Vital Statistics Agency with PharmaNet data for the project.
