Performance Measurement in Surgery

With growing recognition that the quality of surgical care varies widely, good measures of performance are in high demand. An ever-broadening array of performance measures is being developed to meet these different needs; however, considerable uncertainty remains about which measures are most useful for measuring surgical quality. Current measures encompass different elements of health care structure, process of care, and patient outcomes. This review covers overview of surgical quality measures, categories of quality measures, structural measures of quality, process of care measures, direct outcome measures, matching the measure to the purpose, improving existing performance measures, and the future of performance measurement. Figures show relative ability of historical (2005-2006) measures of hospital volume and risk-adjusted mortality to predict subsequent (2007-2008) risk-adjusted mortality in US Medicare patients, risk-adjusted mortality and morbidity for colon resection at individual hospitals before and after adjustment for reliability, variation in surgeon technical skill for 20 bariatric surgeons performing laparoscopic gastric bypass in the Michigan Bariatric Surgery Collaborative (MBSC), and relationship of surgeon technical skill and risk-adjusted complications and resource use after laparoscopic gastric bypass in the MBSC. The table lists primary strengths and limitations of structure, process, and outcome measures. This review contains 4 highly rendered figures, 1 table, and 34 references