Quality Committees and Projects
Mount Sinai's Department of Surgery actively monitors surgical quality data through a host of oversight committees.
The Performance Improvement Committee (PIC) holds monthly multidisciplinary meetings where we look at our surgical quality indicators and monitor our internal performance metrics. The team includes representatives from colon and rectal surgery, general surgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery, surgical oncology, pediatric surgery and vascular surgery. Our goal is to identify how we can improve patient care, increase efficiency, and monitor trends.
The Quality Assurance Committee reviews any adverse clinical outcomes to determine if there is an opportunity to improve our processes and care standards. During our monthly meetings, cases are reviewed in depth and strategies to prevent similar adverse events are discussed.
The Morbidity & Mortality Conference is a weekly meeting with representation from every hospital in the Health System. As a joint initiative between Surgical Quality and Surgical Education, surgeons-in-training discuss the complex cases of the week and supplement the discussion with published data that is relevant to the clinical decision-making process. Some surgical areas also hold service line-specific meetings to more acutely review events and cases from that specialty.
Projects – at any given time, our team is working on a wide variety of projects, ranging from event-driven data analyses to full-scale process restructuring across multiple departments.
Examples of recent projects include:
- Creating a pre-operative pathway and order set for vascular patients
- Facilitating advanced care directives for emergency surgical patients
- Implementing enhanced recovery measures for patients undergoing bowel resection
- Optimizing diagnostic imaging for patients being transferred for appendectomy
- Controlling pain while reducing opioids in the hospital and at discharge
- Overhauling the communication and response to trauma patients in the ED
- Integrating a system-wide weekly conference to analyze surgical outcomes