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NQF publishes report on cardiac surgery performance measures

Patient Safety Monitor Alert, February 9, 2005

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The National Quality Forum (NQF) published a new set of national consensus standards for improving the quality of cardiac surgery, according to PR Newswire.

"More than 70% of 4,000 cardiac surgeons at 1,000 hospitals already use some of these measures for their internal quality improvement efforts," said Jeffrey B. Rich, MD, a cardiac surgeon on the NQF board of directors and chair of the Virginia Cardiac Surgery Quality Initiative. "Creating a standardized, widely endorsed set of voluntary consensus standards extends that reach to all cardiac surgery programs and creates an important tool to both gauge the quality of our work and provide quality of care to consumers."

The report provides 21 measures for hospitals to facilitate efforts to improve patient safety and patient outcomes.

"Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and certain cardiac surgical procedures are among the most common surgeries performed in U.S. hospitals," said Kenneth W. Kizer, MD, MPH, president and chief executive officer of the NQF. "Improving the outcomes of these procedures would have major public health benefit."

The measures include:

• participating on a systematic database for cardiac surgery
• timing of antibiotic administration for cardiac surgery patients
• selection of antibiotic administration for cardiac surgery patients
• pre-operative beta blockade
• prolonged intubation
• duration of prophylaxis for cardiac surgery patients
• stroke/cerebrovascular accident
• renal insufficiency

To view the entire list of measures and the executive summary of the report, visit the NQF Web site at www.qualityforum.org.

To read the PR Newswire press release, click here.

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