Scaling and Spreading Electronic Capture of Patient-Reported Outcomes Leveraging a National Surgical Quality Improvement Program

Advances in perioperative care and surgical technologies have resulted in over 50 million ambulatory surgical procedures in the United States each year. Defined as outpatient or 23-hour stay procedures, complications in ambulatory surgery are rare and occur in less than 0.5 percent of cases. Despite the safety record of these procedures, collecting and understanding patient-reported outcomes (PROs) from ambulatory surgery patients continues to be important and relevant. By evaluating the impact of treatment from the patient’s perspective, PRO information could facilitate shared decision making and care goal discussions.

Despite the potential influence of PROs on ambulatory surgical care, few ambulatory care centers are routinely capturing this information. Successful models for capturing PROs in this setting are rare, and those that do exist remain isolated within their institutions. This research proposes to evaluate the feasibility of disseminating a health information technology (IT)-enabled PRO implementation across the United States for surgical quality improvement (QI). By leveraging the American College of Surgeons’ National Surgical Quality Improvement Program’s existing infrastructure, the research team will have access to a registry of more than 600 hospitals and 400,000 ambulatory procedures, as well as more than 50 active learning collaboratives of hospitals sharing ideas and solving problems around shared QI goals.

The specific aims of the research are as follows:

• To demonstrate the feasibility for widespread adoption of the routine, health IT-enabled capture of PROs from ambulatory surgical patients to at least 30 hospitals for QI. 
• To identify and understand common and unique best practices to spread the health IT-enabled PRO implementation. 
• To explore the potential of identifying QI gaps with aggregated PROs. 

This research will establish the first surgical clinical registry in the US to widely and systemically measure PROs and will provide important information regarding the care of ambulatory care patients. The researchers propose this study could be used to support the development of national, value-based, patient-centered metrics.