Article Describes Importance of ACS Programmatic Measures for Quality Improvement

ACS surgeon leaders and staff authored a recent article in the open-access Health Affairs Scholar, which provides background, key details, and applications for “programmatic measures,” a new performance measure framework that aligns structure, process, and outcome-based measures.

The many moving parts of modern healthcare delivery suggest that individual measures do not adequately represent how surgical or healthcare quality is delivered on the frontlines, and the ACS raised concerns with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that current measures, which focus on single instances or services delivered in care, perpetuate care silos.

Building on its experience in defining surgical quality, the ACS has developed programmatic measures that refocus care around the patient and begin to look at quality from the patient’s perspective. Programmatic measures help care teams to build a program around a patient, create incentives for the team to organize around the patient, incentivize true quality improvement cycles, and deliver on patient goals. 

Per the article, “These measures are designed to address the current burdens of overabundant metrics, priority misalignment, and low resources in a patient-centric fashion to better align healthcare quality and measurement.

The ACS has long taken a programmatic approach to quality, finding notable successes in ACS Trauma Verification, Commission on Cancer, Children’s Surgery Verification, and Geriatric Surgery Verification, among other areas.

Explore ACS Quality Programs.