Thursday, August 04, 2005
Cause for Taking Heart
Those who have been discouraged about the prospects of reforming our system of health care can take heart at the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) announced in the July 28, 2005 issue of AHA News Now, the e-mail newsletter of the American Hospital Association.
The goal of the project is to reduce surgical complications by 25% by 2010. The ten national sponsoring organizations are:
The American Hospital Association
The American College of Surgeons
The U.S. Veteran’s Administration
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement
The American Society of Anesthesiologists
The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses
The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations
The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
An editorial in the July 25, 2005 issue of AHA News, the Association’s print newsletter, said that SCIP would offer “….evidence-based educational and clinical management tools that have been proven to dramatically reduce the most common surgical complications – surgical wound infections, blood clots, post-surgery heart attack and pneumonia.” The appropriate use of antibiotics near the time of surgery and the use of beta blockers were given as examples.
This project is truly remarkable in that it is an overt attempt by non-physician interests – in collaboration with physician interests, to be sure - to influence how surgeons do their work, and to do so through hospitals. In recent memory such a thing would have been condemned as lay interference in the practice of medicine.
The promise held out by SCIP is that health care institutions will at long last become able to manage and, one hopes, improve health care processes in their entirety, unhampered by the cultural barriers that have in the past separated their otherwise indivisible professional (i.e., medical) and institutional (e.g., hospital) components.
In other words, it points to hospitals openly accepting overall responsibility and accountability for the quality and cost of health care in our communities.
If that isn’t radical health care reform, I don’t know what is.
Those who have been discouraged about the prospects of reforming our system of health care can take heart at the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) announced in the July 28, 2005 issue of AHA News Now, the e-mail newsletter of the American Hospital Association.
The goal of the project is to reduce surgical complications by 25% by 2010. The ten national sponsoring organizations are:
The American Hospital Association
The American College of Surgeons
The U.S. Veteran’s Administration
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement
The American Society of Anesthesiologists
The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses
The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations
The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
An editorial in the July 25, 2005 issue of AHA News, the Association’s print newsletter, said that SCIP would offer “….evidence-based educational and clinical management tools that have been proven to dramatically reduce the most common surgical complications – surgical wound infections, blood clots, post-surgery heart attack and pneumonia.” The appropriate use of antibiotics near the time of surgery and the use of beta blockers were given as examples.
This project is truly remarkable in that it is an overt attempt by non-physician interests – in collaboration with physician interests, to be sure - to influence how surgeons do their work, and to do so through hospitals. In recent memory such a thing would have been condemned as lay interference in the practice of medicine.
The promise held out by SCIP is that health care institutions will at long last become able to manage and, one hopes, improve health care processes in their entirety, unhampered by the cultural barriers that have in the past separated their otherwise indivisible professional (i.e., medical) and institutional (e.g., hospital) components.
In other words, it points to hospitals openly accepting overall responsibility and accountability for the quality and cost of health care in our communities.
If that isn’t radical health care reform, I don’t know what is.
