At this year’s PRACTICE MANAGEMENT™ conference, physician anesthesiologists as well as ASA staff members from the Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) and Department of Quality and Regulatory Affairs (QRA) described how local data can be collected and submitted to AQI for benchmarking and quality improve-ment purposes. Implicit in this discussion was the notion that local quality measurement and improvement activities can contribute to a better understanding of where measurement gaps exist while at the same time address the desires of local practices to benchmark their data against their peers nationally.
Specialty societies have invested heavily in registries to improve the practice of medicine, facilitate research on best practices for improving patient outcomes and identify opportunities for better efficiencies in our health care system. Hundreds of practices and thousands of individual physician anesthesiologists, certified registered nurse anesthetists and certified anesthesiologist assistants have contributed a significant amount of data since the founding of...
