$1,334,726
The Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP)
University of Washington
Co Investigator: Sean Sullivan, Ph.D.
Dr. Flum is a gastrointestinal surgeon and outcomes researcher at the University of Washington. He holds the rank of Associate Professor in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health and serves as the Director of the Surgical Outcomes Research Center (SORCE) at the University of Washington. He is one of the Principal Investigators of the Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery (LABS) study and the Medical Director of the Surgical Clinical Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP).
Emerging healthcare technology offers hope to cure disease and ease suffering, but there are few restrictions on clinicians' use of healthcare technology and no surveillance regarding its safety and effectiveness once in the field. This lack of surveillance allows gaps in quality and increases healthcare costs. Across Washington State the use of emerging, minimally invasive surgical procedures for obesity, colorectal cancer, aneurysms and vascular disease is highly variable and when they are used there appears to be nearly 5-fold variation between hospitals in the occurrence of serious complications. Tracking the variation in use of healthcare technologies between hospitals will directly facilitate outcomes improvements and more cost-effective healthcare.
The Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP) is a prospective, surveillance system focusing on hospital-based technology. SCOAP delivers timely data on appropriate use, effectiveness and safety to clinicians and hospitals and facilitates technology integration teams to transform these data into strategies to reduce inappropriate surgical care. Through the Life Sciences Discovery Fund award, SCOAP will expand to include nearly 50 hospitals in its quality improvement network and add surveillance of new and emerging healthcare technology procedures to ensure in-field effectiveness. We anticipate that SCOAP-participating hospitals will have better short and long-term safety outcomes in the use of new/emerging technology than non-SCOAP-participating hospitals and that SCOAP hospitals will provide more cost-effective care to their patients. Additionally, we aim to improve public knowledge of surgical quality of care by promoting public reporting of SCOAP safety, use and outcome data.
Grant Update
“Through LSDF support, we have achieved many marked successes including the recruitment of nearly 40 additional Washington State hospitals in under three years. Focused efforts have also resulted in increased SCOAP programmatic infrastructure to support the larger collaborative, public outreach for community engagment in SCOAP and surgical quality, and dissemination and translation of data into improved quality of care. In January 2009, we introduced the SCOAP Surgical Checklist and brought together a coalition of healthcare stakeholders to support and encourage its use. The SCOAP coalition set the ambitious goal of 100% adoption by January 2010 and we celebrated this remarkable achievement in March. In the last year, we brought together a dynamic group of vascular surgeons, cardiologists and interventional radiologists to develop and deploy Vascular Interventional SCOAP (VI-SCOAP). VI-SCOAP has been launched in 10 hospitals and is the first performance benchmarking process to join these varied clinical groups. Based on our success in the last year clinicians from many fields have approached us to build new modules onto the SCOAP platform. As a result modules in spine, urology, higher risk surgery, ambulatory surgery and gynecology are currently in development. The enthusiasm of SCOAP colleagues to create these sister programs shows the power of our grassroots collaborative in changing healthcare.
These successes translate into patients at SCOAP hospitals having fewer post-operative complications, shorter lengths of stay and received more evidence-based process of care measures than patients at non-SCOAP hospitals. In its first 3 years, projections indicate that SCOAP hospitals also reduced healthcare costs by over $30 million.
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See also:
| May 12, 2010 | Surgical checklist making operations safer [ KING 5 NEWS ] |
| Mar 22, 2010 | Surgical Checklists Make Operations Safer in Washington [ KPLU RADIO ] |
| Mar 21, 2010 | In the operating room, a good idea [ THE SEATTLE TIMES ] |
