The Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) is designed to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness, and cost of vascular health care. It uses the structure of a Patient Safety Organization to permit collection of patient-identified information but protect benchmarked comparisons from legal discovery. The SVS VQI is uniquely organized as a distributed network of regional quality groups to facilitate local translation of registry data into practice change while maintaining the power of a national registry. Detailed data specific to each commonly performed open and endovascular procedure are collected, both in-hospital and at ≥ 1 year of follow-up. Quality measures are reported to physicians and hospitals, which allow anonymous risk-adjusted benchmarking within regions or nationally. All specialties that perform vascular procedures are included, and international participation is encouraged. This review describes the current status of the SVS VQI.
Copyright © 2012 Society for Vascular Surgery. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.