Quality in EUS: an assessment of baseline compliance and performance improvement by using the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy-American College of Gastroenterology quality indicators.

Background: An American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy-American College of Gastroenterology (ASGE-ACG) task force recently developed quality indicators for the preprocedure, intraprocedure, and postprocedure phases of each endoscopic procedure. Benchmark rates and clinical significance of compliance have not been determined.

Objectives: To establish baseline compliance rates to the preprocedure and intraprocedure quality indicators in our EUS cases, identify indicators with the lowest compliance rates, and establish change in compliance rates with a targeted performance improvement plan.

Methods: We measured baseline compliance to each of the preprocedure and intraprocedure EUS quality indicators in the EUS procedures performed at Mayo Clinic Jacksonville from March 1996 through August 2006. We developed a performance improvement plan that targeted the 4 indicators with the lowest compliance over the entire time period. Compliance rates in the year after plan implementation were compared with those from January 2004 to August 2006, when adjusting for endoscopist and direct access.

Results: We demonstrated areas of high quality as well as areas for improvement in compliance with the ASGE-ACG quality metrics in a large cohort of EUS cases. We achieved improvement in all 4 areas targeted for quality improvement, statistically significant at the 5% level for two of the quality indicators.

Limitations: Limitations included our retrospective design and the use of unstructured procedure dictations that may limit application of our results. It is also unclear whether compliance was truly synonymous with performance.

Conclusions: We established reference levels of compliance rate within our practice and showed that a targeted performance improvement plan that consisted of awareness, individual accountability, and documentation can result in improvement.