April 17, 2023 – The American College of Surgeons announced the launch of its Power of Quality campaign—a national, multi-year campaign aimed at improving care for all patients by expanding the reach of ACS Quality Programs to more hospitals nationwide. These evidence-based programs have been proven to improve patient outcomes, streamline hospital processes, and lower costs. Working closely with hospitals and surgeons, the ACS will also promote policy frameworks and incentives that keep quality at the forefront of patient care.
The healthcare community faces regulatory and cost hurdles at every turn in a post-pandemic environment. Current national strategies for achieving high quality care are not working well enough, failing to truly measure quality and make improvements. ACS Quality Programs are critical in providing real-world solutions that improve the delivery of surgical care. As the trusted leader on surgical quality, the ACS founded its Quality Programs with the intention of benefiting hospitals, surgeons, and the patients they care for.
The ACS has 18 Quality Programs, ranging from specialties like trauma, cancer, geriatrics, bariatrics, and children’s surgery, as well as strategic programs aimed at addressing the processes of a hospital’s entire surgical system. ACS Quality Programs not only define the foundations needed to improve surgical care but also offer a roadmap for an entire care team to achieve high quality. This differs from the current national strategy that largely sets outcome goals without ensuring support to achieve them, leading to significant variability in patient care.
In practice, ACS Quality Programs have helped hospitals improve results in a variety of ways, including:
- Hospitals participating in ACS National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) prevent 250 to 500 complications, save between 12 to 36 lives, and reduce cost by millions of dollars each year. This is true across all hospital types – large and small, urban and rural, and teaching and non-teaching1.
- With the ACS Quality Verification Program, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital was able to identify, through a holistic approach, how to best provide for pre-op optimization and medical clearance, which allowed for it to go from 6% to 8% day-of surgery cancellations to less than 1%2.
- The ACS Geriatric Surgery Verification (GSV) Program reduces the average postoperative length of stay in hospitals from 5 days to 4 days3.
In conjunction with the Power of Quality campaign, the ACS has launched an emblem, the Surgical Quality Trust Mark, to enable hospitals participating in ACS Quality programs to showcase their commitment to improving care for the patients they serve. Verification and the display of the diamond mark allow hospitals to showcase that they have met the high standards for care in the ACS programs in which they participate.
As part of the campaign launch, the ACS plans to work with a number of hospitals and health systems to share real-world impacts of how ACS Quality Programs are benefiting patients and surgical systems. Inova Health System, the first hospital that ACS has begun to work with, is currently a participant in eight ACS Quality Programs, including the ACS Quality Verification Program (QVP), which is meant to improve surgical care across its five hospitals in Northern Virginia.