Anesthesia Quality Improvement: Current State and Future Opportunities.

Continuous improvement of quality and safety is a professional obligation of anesthesiologists and an ongoing activity of all academic departments and private practices. Quality improvement is an infinite process that is never fully complete but that instead evolves over time in response to emerging threats to patient safety from new medications, new surgical procedures, and increased recognition of systematic threats. This review discusses current definitions and thinking in anesthesia quality improvement, outlines recommended efforts at the local department level, and makes suggestions for the projects and activities most likely to benefit the anesthesia patients and clinicians of the future.

Disparities in Anti-emetic Prophylaxis Care Processes are Predicted by Patient Neighborhood: A Retrospective Cohort and Geospatial Analysis.

Background: Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) continue to drive persistent disparities in perioperative care. Our team has previously demonstrated racial and socioeconomic disparities in perioperative processes, notably in the administration of antiemetic prophylaxis, in several large perioperative registries. Given how neighborhoods are socially segregated in the US, we examined geospatial clustering of perioperative antiemetic disparities.

Strategies to Limit Benzodiazepine Use in Anesthesia for Older Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Despite guidelines recommending avoidance of benzodiazepine administration to older patients, many of them now receive benzodiazepines as a part of anesthesia care. The effectiveness of clinician- and patient-facing interventions to discourage such use remains insufficiently characterized.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of clinician peer comparison, patient informational mail, or a combination of these interventions compared with usual care on the rate of perioperative benzodiazepine administration to older patients.