General Surgical Outcomes Quality Improvement Database (UH-SOCRATES)

Since the Institute of Medicine report, titled "To Err is Human", there has been an increasing trend to evaluate outcomes in healthcare. While optimal outcomes in delivery of healthcare are something that hospitals and their medical, nursing and administrative staff have always tried to achieve, this has often been attempted without having much information to assess the outcomes that actually occur.

For this reason, programs such as NSQIP (the National Surgical Quality Improvement Project) have been brought from the VA system into private and academic healthcare systems, to sample surgical outcomes and provide hospitals with benchmarks that can be achieved, as well as informing them where they rank in the overall results. Unfortunately, systems such as NSQIP are based on sampling a percentage of cases performed each week, but do not track all cases or all providers. Many cases are therefore not tracked in any way.

Certain centers have now established databases to track their own surgical outcomes. These are usually specific to certain surgical specialties, and provide an opportunity to perform quality improvement. These also have the added value of being useful tools for maintenance of certification and for clinical research.

Primary goals of this study:

We propose to further develop the General Surgical Outcomes Quality Improvement Database(GSOD)-subsequently renamed UH-SOCRATES-which will track all surgical, medical, and radiological encounters occurring at University Hospitals Case Medical Center(UHCMC)as well as at UH's Richmond and Geauga campuses. This database will have several goals: