News Releases

Health Services Advisory Group (HSAG), Medicare's Quality Improvement Organization in Arizona, will provide technical and professional guidance and support in the state when a new national campaign launches next summer to reduce surgical complications. The goal for the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) is to reduce surgical complications by 25 percent nationally by the year 2010 in four target areas: surgical site infections (SSIs) and cardiac, respiratory, and venous thromboembolic complications.

Since the Institute of Medicine's 2000 report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, drew attention to the number of preventable errors in health care, intense public scrutiny has providers, insurers, and purchasers searching for reliable methods to improve quality in surgical care. According to studies, more than 40 million surgical procedures are performed in the United States each year and, depending on the procedure, up to one-half of these procedures could have postoperative complications associated with them. Complications can include respiratory difficulty, blood clots, adverse cardiac events, and infection. These complications take a significant toll on the patients involved and raise the overall cost of health care, increasing length of stay and hospital costs.

SCIP is a national quality partnership of public and private sector organizations that is promising to be a transformational effort to prevent postoperative complications in the United States. This project will build upon the successes of the three-year national Surgical Infection Prevention (SIP) Project, which began in August 2002. A national SCIP steering committee and technical expert panels are working to develop a quality improvement framework to improve both patient safety and the quality of care for surgical services nationwide.

Preliminary information about the SCIP Partnership was presented to the medical community for the first time at the American College of Surgeons' Congress, held October 10?14 in New Orleans, Louisiana, by one of the SCIP steering committee members, David Hunt, MD, FACS, medical officer with the CMS Quality Improvement Group.

"SCIP will take the measures we have been using for SIP, which are entirely for antimicrobial prophylaxis, and expand them to address a number of post-operative complications such as acute myocardial infarction or post-op pneumonia," said Dr. Hunt. "Through SCIP, we will continue to work on SSIs, but the scope of what we're going to address will expand considerably."

The SCIP partnership was initiated in 2003 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through the formation of a steering committee. Representatives of 10 organizations comprise the committee, including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, American College of Surgeons, American Hospital Association, American Society of Anesthesiologists, Association of periOperative Nurses, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Veterans Affairs, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

In preparation for an official launch in summer 2005, several developmental activities are currently under way, including completion of a three-state demonstration pilot, the formation of four technical expert panels to provide specialized guidance for improving each of the four target areas, and development of information, materials, and evidence-based strategies to help the hospitals and their professional staffs participate?and succeed?in this national effort.

"What is so exciting about SCIP is the intense and intimate participation by all the organizations, as well as the spread of the work outside the Medicare population," Dr. Hunt adds.

For more information, visit and bookmark the SCIP Partnership's Web site at www.MedQIC.org/scip.