Archive for October, 2018

Improving the quality of care remains a priority for most hospitals, and delivering standardized care based on evidence-based protocols is a vital step in ensuring key quality measures such as increased efficiency, reduced complications, and improved patient outcomes. Surgical Affiliates assists our hospital partners in improving standardization of surgical care by providing high-quality trauma and acute care surgical hospitalist programs designed according to evidence-based best practices that are patient-centered. By decreasing variability in the delivery of surgical care, standardization of care helps to ensure that every patient receives the highest standard of care available and leads to a series of meaningful benefits for both patients and providers.

Improving Efficiency and Protecting Patients

Standardization has long been a staple ingredient in industries from power and automobile manufacturing to banking and telecommunications. In providing formal guidelines for specific procedures, standardization supports effective management and improves operational efficiency – especially in complex industries with multi-step processes. In healthcare, a growing body of evidence has shown that – as in any other industry with great complexity – standardizing processes and functions reduces mistakes and improves efficiency, leading to better patient outcomes. Our acute care surgical hospitalist programs utilize evidence-based protocols as the building blocks of procedure-specific guidelines and treatment algorithms, ensuring that experienced Surgical Affiliates healthcare professionals deliver the highest, most consistent level of quality care to every patient based on evidence-based best practices.

Providing standardized care according to evidence-based protocols decreases variability in surgical care and helps to protect patients during surgery, ensuring that no step is missed that could jeopardize patient safety. A key example of how a standardized protocol is important for protecting patients in the process of handoffs, the method of transferring the responsibility of patient care from one healthcare provider to another. This real-time process involves transferring specific information to ensure continuity of care for a patient. Time pressure and a lack of standardization may result in handoffs that are incomplete or inconsistent, undermining continuity of care and increasing the risk of patient complications. However, our teams of experienced acute care surgeons and healthcare providers comply with a standardized handoff protocol that ensures accuracy, continuity of care, and better outcomes for patients.

Enhancing Personalization of Care

Standardized and personalized care approaches can work hand in hand in delivering the highest level of care to patients. Standardization often enhances personalization by streamlining work for physicians, giving them more time to spend with patients. What’s more, standardization can help to reduce complications and the resulting time expenditure of not adhering to best practices. Because physicians make treatment decisions based in part on their unique clinical experience, standardization balances this variation in experience by revealing the outcome-specific treatments that have proven effective for thousands of patients. In this way, standardization supplements physician experience and reduces guesswork – serving as the foundation of personalized patient care for our acute care surgeons and healthcare teams.

Surgical Affiliates – a national leader in establishing high-quality trauma and acute care surgical hospitalist programs – offers our hospital partners unequaled knowledge and expertise in acquiring and maintaining ACS trauma center verification. This distinctive, enhanced level of verification extends beyond state verification requirements in providing hospitals with evidence-based protocols that significantly elevate the standard of trauma care. Our surgeon-led corporate leadership team has extensive experience as both the American College of Surgeons and state-specific site reviewers, giving our hospital partners an effective depth of leadership and experience during every phase of the ACS verification process. Established by the American College of Surgeons in 1987, the Committee on Trauma (COT) Consultation/Verification Program for Hospitals promotes the development of trauma centers that provide the hospital resources necessary for trauma care as well as the entire spectrum of care to address the needs of all injured patients.

The Considerable Benefits of an ACS-Verified Trauma Center

Leveraging our extensive experience in site verifications, Surgical Affiliates works hand-in-hand with our hospital partners in helping their trauma programs achieve and maintain ACS verification standards – opening the door to an array of meaningful benefits that make the process worthwhile.

Patients receive the highest level of trauma care.

For massively injured patients, hospitals with ACS-verified trauma programs are able to mobilize quickly and respond immediately – such as supplying blood to a patient within 90 seconds of arrival. When hospitals are prepared and equipped according to these standards, patients benefit from receiving the highest level of trauma care.

ACS verification status leads to better patient outcomes.

Of course, patients receiving care for a trauma-related injury aren’t in a position to choose their healthcare team due to the urgency of the situation. ACS verification status ensures that healthcare providers adhere to the highest standards for trauma care, reducing the risk of complications and leading to better outcomes for patients. In fact, several studies have shown a relationship between ACS-verified trauma centers and patient complication rates, including a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons that found an association between the lack of ACS verification and an increased complication rate for patients of any age who sustain major injuries.

It’s a financially sound decision for hospitals.

While the ACS verification process requires a significant financial commitment, our hospital partners who acquire the designation derive the financial benefits of a well-managed trauma program, such as markedly improved performance and efficiencies that impact the entire organization.

It has a significant “halo effect.”

Trauma center verification provides a structure of trauma care that produces a “halo effect” throughout the hospital organization, resulting in improved performance and efficiencies across multiple departments. Due to these wide-ranging effects, an ACS-verified trauma center can serve as a process improvement program that tends to raise the level of performance throughout a hospital.

It serves the community and keeps care locally.

The heart of a hospital’s mission is to serve the community. Establishing an ACS-verified trauma center provides an invaluable service to communities and patients by keeping care local, helping to reduce or eliminate the need to transfer patients to distant facilities to receive trauma care.

ACS verification status brings prestige.

Verification by the American College of Surgeons brings a level of credibility and respect regarding a hospital’s resources and capabilities in providing trauma care. In an era when hospital differentiation is important, an ACS-verified trauma center can help to establish a hospital’s reputation as a well-known provider of exceptional, specialized care within the community and the region.