There has been no formal, standardized curriculum for neurosurgical resident education in quality improvement. There are at least 2 reasons to integrate a formalized quality improvement curriculum into resident education:…
The US health care system is currently undergoing a paradigm shift from pay-for-service toward pay-for-performance reimbursement, with a focus on quality measures and patient satisfaction. An important tool gaining increasing…
For a variety of neurosurgical conditions, increasing surgeon and hospital volumes correlate with improved outcomes, such as mortality, complication rates, length of stay, hospital charges, and discharge disposition. Neurosurgeons can…
Innovation to improve patient care quality is a priority of the neurosurgical specialty since its beginnings. As the strain on health care resources increases, the cost of these quality improvements…
Cost and value are increasingly important components of health care discussions. Despite a plethora of cost and cost-effectiveness analyses in many areas of medicine, there has been little of this…
The Model for Improvement and the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle is a popular quality improvement (QI) tool for health care providers to successfully lead QI projects and redesign care processes. This tool…
Although federal programs aimed at improving the overall value of health care are well intentioned, most remain fundamentally flawed in terms of their metrics, their methodologies, and the pace at…
Adverse events are common in neurosurgery. Their reporting is inconsistent and widely variable due to nonuniform definitions, data collection mechanisms, and retrospective data collection. Historically, neurosurgery has lagged behind general…
Medical errors are common and dangerous, estimated to cause over 400,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. The field of neurosurgery is not immune to these errors, and…
The delivery of safe healthcare is one of the fundamental tenets of medicine, but the study of patient safety has lagged in neurosurgery. Patients are at high risk for medical…
