Quality Performance

Regardless of federal and state payers, practices should consider collecting data on quality measures and reporting the data to the Anesthesia Quality Institute^® (AQI^®) National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry^® (NACOR^®). Each practice and individual member reporting to AQI NACOR receives a detailed dashboard of their measures that benchmarks across anesthesia practices.

What You Should Know

• Anesthesia practices should collect data on quality measures for payment purposes, contract negotiations and local quality improvement initiatives.
• Choose quality measures that reflect your practice workflows and will drive quality improvement.
• Collect and report quality measure data to AQI NACOR.
• Implement processes to assess your data on a monthly basis.
• Use your quality measure performance to enhance your relationship with local hospital administrators and in contract negotiations.

What ASA and AQI are Doing

• ASA created a microsite dedicated to understanding quality performance. 
• NACOR collects data on performance measures, provides gap and outlier analysis and shares access to improvement interventions and peer-to-peer benchmarks.
• NACOR provides templates for practices to collect outcomes data intraoperatively, at PACU discharge, and in subsequent patient follow up one to seven days after surgery.
• NACOR offers recommendations on how to measure and report on patient satisfaction.
• Each year, ASA hosts an open call of measure concepts and a public comment period on new measures. This has resulted in more than 40 quality measures physician anesthesiologists can report and track in AQI NACOR. Measures include those for subspecialties like regional anesthesia and pain medicine, ambulatory and cardiac anesthesia.
• ASA is the leader in developing anesthesia quality measures for the specialty. We advocate on behalf of our members for private and public payers to use quality measures that reflect anesthesia quality care and patient outcomes.