A system-wide extracorporeal membrane oxygenation quality collaborative improves patient outcomes.

Objective: Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) use in adult patient populations has grown rapidly with wide variation in practices and outcomes. We evaluated the impact on patient outcomes, resource use, and costs of an initiative to coordinate and standardize best practices across ECMO programs within a large integrated health care system.

Methods: The ECMO Collaborative Project brought clinicians and service-line leaders from 4 programs within a single health care system together with operational subject matter experts tasked with developing and implementing standardized guidelines, order sets, and an internal database to support an automated quarterly report card.

Misclassification of Mitral Valve Disease and Rate of Surgical Repair in The Society of Thoracic Surgeons Database.

Background: Surgical repair of primary mitral regurgitation (MR) is considered an indicator of quality performance. Therefore, accurate data reporting is critical for quality assessment. During an institutional quality review, MR etiology could not be determined in 40% of operations in The Society of Thoracic Surgeons database entries, and therefore our true repair rate could not be reliably ascertained.

Description of a Method to Obtain Complete One-Year Follow-Up in the Society of Thoracic Surgeons/American College of Cardiology Transcatheter Valve Therapy Registry.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services National Coverage Determination requires centers performing transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) to report clinical outcomes up to 1 year. Many sites encounter challenges in obtaining complete 1-year follow-up. We report our process to address this challenge.