Should We Be SCIPing Out on Reporting Surgical Care Quality Measures?

Research supports the efficacy of the individual quality measures in the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP), but evidence is mounting that publicly reported SCIP performance is not necessarily associated with better clinical outcomes.

Researchers examined administrative data from 2006 to 2008 on more than 400,000 surgical discharges from 398 hospitals that voluntarily report SCIP data. The primary outcome was number of postoperative infections. The investigators grouped SCIP measures that related to infection prevention into two composite metrics:

• S-INF-Core — Three measures related to prophylactic antibiotic administration (timing before surgery, appropriate antibiotics, and timing of cessation)

• S-INF — Six measures that included S-INF-…