Putting Quality First during Challenging Times

By Patricia L. Turner, MD, MBA, FACS

Emerging from the pandemic, hospitals are facing the greatest challenges they have seen in decades. Rising labor costs, clinician shortages, inflation, and the end of COVID-19 funding are among some of the reasons hospitals are feeling financially squeezed.

It's precisely at times like these that we must recommit ourselves to quality. Quality programs save money by improving efficiency and enhancing patient outcomes. Complications and readmissions are reduced. Lives are saved. Hospitals run more efficiently. We owe it to our patients to prioritize quality and outcomes. Short-term budget cuts in quality programs can have long-lasting negative consequences, counter-intuitively driving costs up.

For more than 100 years, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) has been committed to improving surgical quality. We’ve authored the standards that set the bar for evidence-based surgical care in numerous areas. Our verification and accreditation programs are developed with physicians and quality experts and embraced by more than 2,500 hospitals to support better patient care, improve surgical processes, and conserve precious resources every day.

We must continue to center on quality improvement. That’s why the American College of Surgeons has launched our Power of Quality Campaign to foster more dialogue among hospitals, surgeons, policymakers, payers and patients about what works. We want to ensure there is never a barrier to high-quality care and that patients and their families know how to reliably define and confidently access the best evidence-based surgical care.

Evidence-based improvement

Investing in evidence-based improvement programs like the ones the ACS offers helps hospitals build a culture of quality care across their institution.

The data are clear. ACS Quality Programs save lives by providing hospitals with the tools to improve their processes, reduce patient complications and lower costs. For example, in each hospital where it was deployed, the ACS National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) prevented, on average between 250-500 surgical complications and saved between 12-36 lives each year.

The ACS Geriatric Surgery Verification program, for example, reduces the average postoperative length of stay in hospitals by a full day – a dramatically better outcome for patients while simultaneously streamlining the operations of hospitals that participate.

At a time when so many challenges are facing hospitals, ACS efforts to ignite discussion and spur adoption of more programs can address gaps in the delivery of high-quality healthcare and ensure that hospitals center quality at every turn.

Patricia L. Turner, MD, MBA, FACS is the Executive Director and CEO of the American College of Surgeons, the world’s largest surgical association comprising more than 87,000 members.