Intermountain Healthcare joins NPA’s QOD to improve quality of care

Apr 7 2017

Intermountain Healthcare recently signed on as NeuroPoint Alliance's (NPA) first health system. Intermountain is participating in all of the current Quality Outcomes Databases (QOD): Lumbar, Deformity, Cervical and Neurovascular and are awaiting the fifth QOD registry, Tumor, which NPA plans to have on line in 2018.

Four hospitals, representing 18 neurosurgeons and ortho-spine surgeons, are currently being trained to submit data to QOD. Two other hospitals will be added in subsequent years.

"Intermountain Healthcare has an international reputation for safe, cost-effective delivery of health care and quality improvement processes. In an effort to further elevate the level of spine and cranial surgery and procedures performed at each of our Intermountain Healthcare hospitals, our system-wide neuroscience clinical program has partnered with NPA's QOD. Our system-wide goal, when it comes to spine and cranial patient outcomes, is real-time, standardized benchmarking: locally within our own health care system as well as regionally and nationally," said Ben Fox, MD, medical director, neurosurgery, at Intermountain Healthcare.

"This partnership with QOD allows us to benchmark safety, cost and patient-reported outcomes locally between our various internal Intermountain Healthcare institutions where spine and cranial procedures are performed. It also allows us to use QOD's nationwide database to compare our patient outcomes to other facilities and nationwide data in a real-time, as well as between the individual Intermountain Healthcare hospitals and the healthcare organization as a whole," Fox added.

Robert E. Harbaugh, MD, FAANS, chair of the NeuroPoint Alliance, stated, "QOD-Spine is the largest spine surgery registry in North America and has been generating reliable data for benchmarking, documenting the value of surgical care and quality improvement. We realized we needed a data reporting solution not only for individual practices but also for hospitals and hospital systems. The addition of high performing health systems like Intermountain will add to the value of the registry and to the well-being of our patients."

As Peter Maughan, MD, medical director, Intermountain Medical Center Neurosciences Institute, added, "Participating in QOD is another step in our commitment to providing quality care that is both efficient and cost effective."

Source: http://www.aans.org/