Improving the Quality and Safety of Regional Surgical Patient Care through the Creation of a Multi-institutional Partnership for the Implementation and Support of Perioperative Informatics Tools
The goal of this multi-institutional partnership, the Southern Perioperative Consortium (SPC), was to improve the quality and safety of surgical patient care in the Middle Tennessee region. The primary strategy to accelerate the achievement of these goals was to create, deploy, and support informatics tools. PREVENT (a Surgical Safety Alert System) provided for the enrollment of the majority of surgical patients in the catchment area through the participation of major surgical care providers in the referral region, providing services for over 50 percent of the surgical cases in Nashville and surrounding communities. Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) provided the informatics and management resources to the Consortium. The partner institutions provided access to surgical patient populations, and clinical and administrative leadership expertise to efficiently create a plan for the implementation of the informatics tools and deliver a successful model for the consortium infrastructure. These commitments were achieved through a series of meetings with potential partner institutions at which the Consortium goals were presented and reviewed in detail, informatics resources were described, and commitment to participation in the planning process was sought. Over the course of the 24-month planning period, the SPC met and presented the goals to clinical, administrative, and quality leadership teams representing the Middle Tennessee region. There is interest and support both for the original collaborative safety objectives of the Consortium and in pursuing additional national-level safety initiatives.
