The ACS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have signed a strategic partnership agreement to work on shared goals of reporting, measuring, and preventing surgical site infections (SSIs) and other adverse outcomes among surgical patients. The agreement builds on the initial success of ACS’ and CDC’s joint development of a coordinated SSI measure.
"This partnership will help close gaps that exist between direct patient care and public health," according to CDC’s Daniel Pollock, MD, a medical epidemiologist and the surveillance branch chief in CDC’s division of health care quality promotion. "Bringing clinicians, surveillance experts, and prevention leaders to the same table will help ensure we collect the right data in the right way so that patient safety can be maximized."
More specifically, the ACS and the CDC will continue to develop quality of care measures, fostering greater use of electronic health record systems for quality measurement purposes, exchanging data between ACS and CDC systems, and joint analyses and reports using data collected through the ACS National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) and CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). Go to http://www.facs.org/news/2012/acs-cdc0412.html to view an April 16 press release announcing the partnership. Go to http://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/ for more information on the NHSN, and go to http://site.acsnsqip.org/ to view the ACS NSQIP website.